Utilising journey crime mapping and scripting to combat cyber ​​crime

Abstract

Modern societies are now reliant on digital communication and networks for conducting a wide array of tasks, ranging from simple acts such as browsing the web through to mission critical tasks such as the management of critical infrastructure and industrial controls. This reliance shows a growing emphasis on strategic importance of cyberspace (Sharma, 2010). While organisations and individuals are keenly exploiting the benefits of cyberspace, these same platforms have also opened new avenues for nefarious actors in the pursuit of their criminal activities to attack, disrupt, or steal from organisations and individuals. Criminal organisations and lone criminals worldwide have access to powerful, evolving capabilities which they use to identify and target their victims allowing for the perpetration of a wide variety of cyber crimes. This paper discusses ways in which utilising methods from typically non-cyber disciplines – business and criminology – can successfully be applied to the cyber domain in order to help in the fight against and prevention of cyber crime. Through the provision of a visual representation, this paper clarifies how journey mapping and crime scripting can help in building an understanding of the steps criminals undertake during execution of a cyber crime. In essence, within our work we have deconstructed the lifecycle of a crime events and translated these into a visualisation map to show the full event process, highlighting key steps as well as positive and negative events. Such work is useful to several roles and organisation types as it can aid in their decision processes when undertaking steps in pursuit, prevention, preparation and protection