International Cybercrime

Primary Task Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 400–600 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

Research the personality profile of a typical cybercriminal. Then, respond to the following in discussion:

• Provide some details about your findings.
• What are some of the specific sort of crimes that cyber criminals commit?
• Formulate a policy over what society should do about cyber criminals who operate from foreign countries with whom the United States either lacks an extradition treaty, or from countries that are hostile to the United States.

Additional Resources

• Urgent Actions Are Needed to Address Cybersecurity Challenges Facing the Nation
  • The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified four major cybersecurity challenges and 10 critical actions that the federal government and other entities need to take to address them. GAO continues to designate information security as a government-wide high-risk area due to increasing cyber-based threats and the persistent nature of security vulnerabilities.
• Cybercrime: What the FBI Investigates
  • The FBI is the lead federal agency for investigating cyber attacks by criminals, overseas adversaries, and terrorists. The threat is incredibly serious—and growing. Cyber intrusions are becoming more commonplace, more dangerous, and more sophisticated. Our nation’s critical infrastructure, including both private and public sector networks, are targeted by adversaries. American companies are targeted for trade secrets and other sensitive corporate data, and universities for their cutting-edge research and development. Citizens are targeted by fraudsters and identity thieves, and children are targeted by online predators. Just as the FBI transformed itself to better address the terrorist threat after the 9/11 attacks, it is undertaking a similar transformation to address the pervasive and evolving cyber threat. This means enhancing the Cyber Division’s investigative capacity to sharpen its focus on intrusions into government and private computer networks.   

Responses to Other Students: Respond to at least 2 of your fellow classmates with at least a 100-word reply about their Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening. To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:

• What did you learn from your classmate’s posting?
• What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?
• What clarification do you need regarding the posting?
• What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates’ postings?

REPLY TO 

Cybercrime has become the new method in which criminals commit their crimes. The advancements of technology have allowed this new type of crime and criminals to emerge. For those that are not aware, cybercrime are crimes committed against people and/or entities via internet. When it comes to the personality profile of a typical cybercriminal, it appears that “according to studies, the “stereotypical” perpetrator of a cybercrime is “male, 12-28 years old, single, and socially dysfunctional, possibly from a dysfunctional family” (Hadzhidimova, et. al. 2019). Though I find this to be odd as some women are also cybercriminals, I continued my research on this question. What I found was that these individuals have heightened personality traits. These traits were “impulsiveness, aggressiveness, rigidity, lies, selfishness, egocentricity, affluently saturated feelings, peculiar orientations and judgements, hard-to-predict behaviour, abstinence from social reality, inability to internalize moral and legal norms, hostility” (Kipane, 2019). Therefore, the foundation to each cybercriminal is their personality.

The sort of crimes that these cybercriminals commit vary but all are committed through the internet. They look for ways to have ransoms paid to them through ransomware and business email frauds. While others look to steal pertinent information such as identity theft through spoofing (FBI, 2022). One example that occurred within the last year was when cybercriminals known as hackers hacked into the Colonial Pipeline system and hacked their system and requested a ransom to give it back. This caused issues on the East Coast with fuel. Though the Cybersecurity and Intelligence Agency became involved the company still paid the hackers money.

Most cybercriminals that commit crimes in our country are operating from foreign countries, those that we do not have extradition treaties with and those that are hostile towards our country such as Russia. Due to the increase in this crime, the United States instituted an agency to protect the cyber world in our country as so many rely on it. Therefore, that is one step in the formulating a policy for these criminals. According to the High-Risk Series, there are four major cybersecurity challenges that need to be addressed. They are “establishing a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy and performing effective oversight, securing federal systems and information, protecting cyber critical infrastructure, and protecting privacy and sensitive data” (United States Accountability Office, 2018). The policy must include ways to cover these challenges. One method to punish these criminals, hence the country that is protecting them is to impose sanctions on the country. Another method is to try and create extradition treaties with the countries that the United States does not have any with. This could be done by ensuring that the death penalty would not be imposed on them.

References

Personality Traits of a Cybercriminal

The personality trait is described to have some key elements that include the following. Firstly, the cybercriminals’ personality traits are believed to be a broad individual psychological perspective that is stable, interpersonal, and harbors some significant differences in the way of thinking, behaving, and the overall feeling of an individual (Kipane, 2019). Cybercriminals’ personality is linked to the internal desires of an individual to violate the law to attain some personal gains, material benefits, or profits from the crime committed. Family influences are known to directly affect the development of one’s personality hence increasing the possibility of conducting cybercrimes. Family aspects such as failure in the process of upbringing children, family deformity, adverse family issues, and social problems contribute to the being of a cybercriminal. Other aspects attached to cybercriminals’ profiles include criminal professionalism, technical knowledge, characteristics of motivation, social characteristics, and gaps in the literature. Cybercriminals are individuals like any other, with a difference in their character, technical knowledge, and upbringing in totality.

Cybercrimes

Cybercriminals’ different types of crimes are broken down into phishing attacks, malware, and online credential violation. In phishing attacks, cybercriminals utilize emails and other malicious websites to source sensitive information from their victims (Sabillon et al., 2016). The cybercriminals pose as trustworthy agencies to which the victim can easily disclose their personal information without suspicion. Phishing attempts can also occur in the form of texts and voicemails. On the other hand, malware is a common form of cybercrime since it involves various formats. Malware can include Trojan viruses, worms, and spyware which are common components of cybercrimes (Buch et al., 2017). Malware leads to activities such as phishing attacks and password abuses. However, most malware attacks can be avoided by installing effective offenses. Lastly, an online credential violation is a form of cybercrime that can appear in numerous ways, such as ransomware, phishing attacks, and credential stuffing. This results in the cybercriminals illegally gaining access to the personal credentials available online of the employees and the consumers in the society.

Policy Actions on Foreign Cybercriminals

Societies can indulge in combating cybercrimes from foreign nations by taking the necessary measures against cybercrimes seriously. Keeping people in a safe online space is the goal of every nation and individual society. Therefore, the policy will highlight strengthening and improving cyberspace for every individual.

1. There will be a compulsory buildup of capabilities, mainly in law enforcement. This is to cover up the prevalent gaps in the various societies that trigger the occurrence of cybercrimes, more so in developing countries.
2. The various involved nations will indulge in strengthening international cooperation and dialogue (Dodaro, 2018). This is between governments, United Nations, and other international and regional organizations in stopping the spread of cybercrime.
3. Individual society members must create and have different banking devices from their daily usage devices. This will help reduce the risk of computer hacking hence avoiding the misuse of banking online credentials.
4. Societal members will be required to be vigilant about the email attachments opened, avoid the questionable sites, and maintain an antivirus program that can easily detect the occurrence of such cybercrimes(Cybercrime., 2016). This will enable society to protect their data and their children from the occurrence of sexual abuse through cybercrime.

Incorporating the above measures will enable societies and governments to keep track of the events occurring online, raise awareness and create a safe online space for different individuals.