Article Review 1
In the article linked above, “Understanding the Connection Between Hackers and Their Hacks: Analyzing USDOJ Reports for Hacker Profiles”, a significant question was examined: what are the relationships between the age, gender, and nationality of hackers and the sophistication level of their hacks? Social science and cybercrime are undeniably interrelated, and commonly examined. There are a multitude of questions that emerge when discussing the relationship between social science and cybercrime, but in this case specifically, the question that has arisen asks what aspects of an individual may correlate to the characteristics of crimes they commit? The social science principle of relativism encompasses the interrelatedness of all things; the topic of the linked article directly ties in with the principle of relativism because it is questioning the relatedness of personal qualities of an individual and characteristics of cybercrimes. The principle of parsimony can also be relevant to the content of this research article because it raises the notion that social science researchers have to ensure that levels of explanation are kept as simple as possible; researchers that conducted this study really worked to simplify their terms and categories as to not cause confusion and to make their analysis clear and direct.
Researchers reviewed 3 years’ worth of hacking reports released by the United States Department of Justice Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (USDOJ CCIPS) from January 2019 to December 2021. For the sake of simplicity, the researchers decided to only include reports that were categorized as hacks, and to simplify the term hack further they decided to classify it as unauthorized access to a computer. Next, they determined what variables they would use to characterize the attacks:
In order to examine the relationship between the age, gender, and residency of hackers and hack sophistication, six different “hack characteristic” variables were used. The variables are: the hack was accomplished with insider information, social engineering was used in a hack, the attacker built/maintained software for the hack, the hack was used for follow-up hacks, multiple entities were targeted, and one of the entities targeted included an organization. (Gerstenfeld, 2023)
These six characteristics were used to determine the complexity of a cybercrime and were then examined if the characteristics were associated with age, gender, and nationality of an offender. Researchers in this study used descriptive analysis by summarizing past data to explain possible correlations. Criminology is a concept that we have studied in class that can be related to this article; criminology is the study of crime, criminals and how society responds to both. In this study, characteristics of both crimes and criminals are being evaluated and correlated. As discussed in the article, 122 individuals were identified for cybercrimes, with only 8 of them being identified as female and 95 of them being identified as male. The difference shown with male to female hackers could possibly be attributed to the disproportionate number of males in STEM majors and workers, or more specifically computer science majors, that give them the tools and training needed to carry out a cybercrime. This research article can be highly beneficial in the way of helping researchers, cybersecurity experts, and companies etc. better understand ways they might be vulnerable to attacks from different age, gender, and nationality groups; the study identifies the connections between individuals and their ability to carry out a more or less sophisticated cybercrime. Additionally, the analysis of the collected data can aid law enforcement in the profiling of attackers by the characteristics of their attacks.
Reference
Gerstenfeld. (2023). International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, 6(1), 59-76.