Due to the increase in use of personal computers and increasingly easy access to information regarding hacking and other criminal, fraudulent activities, criminal justice and cybercrime are continuously becoming more integrated. From personal to business interactions, humans are trending toward the use of computers in their day-to-day operations. Significant amounts of criminal activity can be linked to criminal behavior. Laws have recently been created to attempt to control and punish criminal acts via the cyber medium. Hacking laws regulate against unauthorized access of computers, and federal malware law makes it illegal to intentionally damage computers by transmitting viruses, worms and other malicious malware. Cybercrimes have been divided into property crimes and crimes against person. Crimes against property are described as theft, cyber bank theft, theft of trade secrets, theft of services, various forms of fraud, extortion and blackmail. Crimes against person are identified as cyber harassment, cyber stalking, and cyber threats. Criminal justice has not adequately kept up with the demands to monitor, control and punish cybercrimes. Cyber security is a large threat especially for financial institutions (McGee, 2016, Reuters, 2017), the federal government (Boyd, 2016), corporations (Moritz and Burg, 2015), and investors (Winn, 2017). Higher education has responded to this by providing more opportunity for education, research and scholarship in the cyber security field. However, there is a still a great deal of necessary research and development required. 

Criminal justice and cybercrime have an overlap in many other disciplines. One of these, in particular, is systems engineering. Systems engingeers apply engineering analysis and design principles that will satisfy critical quality requirements, keeping stakeholders’ information safe. Computer engineers and scientists have the ability to develop computer technology to attempt to further protect victims by increasing computers’ security. A newer overlap can be found in the field of digital forensics. Digital forensics investigates cyber, computer, electronic or other types of cybercrimes.