What is Web, crime and security?

I want to talk about it in three separate parts, first about crime before the Web, and then about crime now on the Web, and then maybe some predictions about where we are going in the future. So I think the first thing that most people who analyze crime and deviance would not think about is that criminal enterprise is built on trust. When two people try to buy and sell stolen credit cards, or anything for that matter, it is based on the idea that this is illegal and that if one person is wrong, there could be cops, arrests, and punishments.

So it’s a really interesting criminological idea that trust is an essential part of crime and deviance.

Now before the Web, you could earn trust through your reputation. And your reputation can be based on toughness, so when you said you’d hit someone, you really did. So he had built-in confidence in his reputation.

You can buy and sell stolen goods, and you can do it face-to-face, and you can build trust that way, based on the reputation and quality of the goods you were buying and selling.

That when you said it was a good stolen laptop, it really worked. This can take place in a pub parking lot, where people would go with their goods and someone would go with their money and you, surreptitiously, and hopefully, without anyone seeing you, would make the deal.

Now, how have things changed on the Web? With the advent of the Web, the Web presented some really cool ways to build trust. One in particular was something called an escrow. And this goes out of business. And it is effectively the idea that a person has the goods and a person has the money.

And there is a trusted third party who will examine both, guard them, and make sure that the products being sold are legitimate or that they actually do what they say they do and that the money is real. And then they will be overlooked. So for example, if you see a stolen credit card, you need to make sure that the credit card is related to a bank account, preferably a bulging bank account. So what happened on the web was that we created these forums, these discussion forums. However, these discussion forums are not just about criminal activity. They can be about whether or not you like a particular movie, say, a James Bond movie, a set of forums about Star Wars, or whatever.

So ultimately what you have are established forums where people can just talk to each other. Now what they have is a private messaging room where you can go behind the scenes out of the prying eyes of the security services, or even the public. Anyone can look at these things.

And they have begun to incorporate this concept of escrow.

And it got these criminal enterprises off the ground. So buying and selling stolen credit cards became big business simply because people could trust that the cards were related to a bank, and that the bank had a bank account, and that there was money in that bank account. , and that the card would work, or at least the data it contains. It’s about data.

Actually, it is not a plastic card. Therefore, trust in the Web increases through our use of these forums. And one of the research that we do here at the University of Southampton is looking at those stolen credit cards and the forums that are used to buy and sell them.

Therefore, crime on the Web is the focus of many security concerns.

However, what that often does is assume that crime only takes place on the web. There is a dichotomy, in reality, between the virtual and the real, and that the virtual happens online and the real happens in the pub parking lot.

And now so much money is being spent on cyber security, web security, that we often forget that crime doesn’t start and end there. They often start outside the ATM. You are trying to withdraw money with your card. Without you knowing, someone is also looking at your PIN and then they take your wallet. And these are crimes that are as old as the hills. We can remember perhaps Charles Dickens and the Artful Dodger and people who stole purses.

So what happens, say, offline, can come back online. Therefore, the stolen credit card that is stolen outside of your bank could be used in one of these forums and sold to someone else. So by spending a lot of money on surveillance and improving web security, we often forget that there is a human aspect to this, that it is literally about people stealing and engaging with you and trying to get you to hand over information.

Which brings me to passwords. One of the things we need to think about in the future is the large number of passwords we have now for security-critical activities that we now engage in more frequently, for example, online banking. So think for a minute about how many passwords you have. You probably have five, six, maybe more different passwords.

So one of the big buzzwords right now is biometrics. And more recently, a smartphone has a biometric fingerprint scanner. Now what this means is that we are, in effect, keeping our passwords in plain sight. Now, as the Web becomes more and more ubiquitous, that is, it becomes more and more localized in us, around us, for example, Google Glass, for example, new watches that could come out, our phones, no longer we are tied to a laptop. or a desk.

So what does that mean for crime and deviance? Well, we really don’t know. We cannot predict. But what we can say is that biometric passwords will be the new battlefield.

The flip side of that, of course, could be what happens when we’ve solved the crime problem? Is that possible. It is a criminological conundrum, the idea that a car can become unbearable, a computer impossible to hack. What happens then?

When CCTV cameras were introduced, the argument was that they either reduced crime or dispersed it or moved it elsewhere. Therefore, it is one of the most interesting aspects of the criminological understanding of anything, but especially the Web. Where do we go next? Ultimately, criminals are always one step ahead. And we just have to push ourselves to keep up.