Connaissances

A ransomware campaign that targeted 23 US cities across Texas has raised serious concerns about the vulnerability of local governments and public services to cyber-attacks.

The scheme has many critics, but the numbers show that it's working well.

Nafees Hamid, UCL and Clara Pretus, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona The young man sitting in the waiting room of our neuroimaging facility wearing skinny jeans and trainers looked like a typical Spanish 20-year-old of Moroccan origin. Yassine* was bouncy, chatting up the research assistants, and generally in good spirits. He was like so many other

At the centre of these various waves is the trial of the alleged perpetrator, accused (to date) of 50 murders and 39 attempted murders. The identities of the attempted murder victims are suppressed at the moment.

On Tuesday, the gunman in the Christchurch mosque shootings was charged with committing a terrorist act. The new charge came more than two months after the massacre. The gunman, who the author and The Conversation have chosen not to name, had already faced 50 charges of murder and 40 charges of attempted murder stemming from the attacks. An additional murder charge was also brought on Tuesday, bringing the total to 51.

In the aftermath of the TalkTalk hack there was speculation over the possible involvement of terrorists, vast financial loss and an impending cybercrime tsunami from stolen personal data. There have been apocalyptic warnings from businesses, and the announcement of government enquiries alongside reports of customers already losing money or receiving fraudulent phone calls.

A report from the parliamentary National Audit Office into the WannaCry ransomware attack that brought down significant parts of Britain’s National Health Service in May 2017 has predictably been reported as blaming NHS trusts and smaller organisations within the care system for failing to ensure that appropriate computer security measures such as software updates and secure firewalls were in place.

The big data phenomenon is driving ‘upstream’ data related cyber-dependent crimes such as data breaches. These crimes are essential components in a cybercrime chain that cascades ‘downstream’ to give rise to further crimes such as fraud and extortion, when the data is subsequently monetized in a way that impacts massively upon victims.

Big data helps organisations predict social behavior. It brings with it a range of exciting new data analytic tools that offer great potential for identifying new truths about social and physical phenomena that were previously impossible to research on such a large scale. Largely the product of cloud technologies which have over the past 15 years, massively increased the number of data flows in circulation, big data is in high demand.

The term ‘Cloud’ is actually a distracting misnomer that obfuscates attempts to systematically understand the impact of the cloud technologies, which have driven services that provide ‘on-demand’ computing resources with increasing effect since the mid-2000s. Moreover, ‘Cloud’ lacks the conceptual clarification needed to understand the implications of cloud technologies upon criminal behavior, crime analysis and also law enforcement.