Exploring cybersecurity and cybercrime: Threats and legal responses
Lachlan Urquhart · Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) · 2018
Introduction:"The only way to patch a vulnerability is to expose it first… the flip side being that exposing the vulnerability leaves you open for an exploit"Cybersecurity is a convoluted domain to navigate, filled with acronyms, esoteric terminology, and an ever-shifting roster of actors and threats.We can begin by thinking about the contested term 'hacker' to get a sense of the diversity 1 .Hackers could be framed as sitting somewhere on the spectrum between law abiding 'white hats' and criminal 'black hats', but that would neglect the richness of the various tribes who mix and overlap.To take a few, we have 1.traditional cyber criminals organising campaigns to infect laptops or smartphones with remote access tools which allow them to record victims in precarious acts via their webcams with a view to extorting them to prevent release of the footage, 2 2. Organised crime groups running peer-to-peer marketplaces on the 'dark net' enabling trade of drugs, people, or extreme pornography, 3 1 To see the history of the term hacker, and associated terms, see S Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution 25 th Anniversary Ed. (Newton: O'Reilly Media, 2010) 2 R.