Bridging Information Security and Environmental Criminology Research to\n Better Mitigate Cybercrime

Cybercrime is a complex phenomenon that spans both technical and human\naspects. As such, two disjoint areas have been studying the problem from\nseparate angles: the information security community and the environmental\ncriminology one. Despite the large body of work produced by these communities\nin the past years, the two research efforts have largely remained disjoint,\nwith researchers on one side not benefitting from the advancements proposed by\nthe other. In this paper, we argue that it would be beneficial for the\ninformation security community to look at the theories and systematic\nframeworks developed in environmental criminology to develop better mitigations\nagainst cybercrime. To this end, we provide an overview of the research from\nenvironmental criminology and how it has been applied to cybercrime. We then\nsurvey some of the research proposed in the information security domain,\ndrawing explicit parallels between the proposed mitigations and environmental\ncriminology theories, and presenting some examples of new mitigations against\ncybercrime. Finally, we discuss the concept of cyberplaces and propose a\nframework in order to define them. We discuss this as a potential research\ndirection, taking into account both fields of research, in the hope of\nbroadening interdisciplinary efforts in cybercrime research.\n