Statistics and Digital Threats

Special Report: Cybercrime
How Security Organizations Quantify Cyber-criminality
By Anne-Marie Côté, Maxime Bérubé, Benoit Dupont
English

Cyber-criminality, seen as the major form of criminality of the 21st century, is a complex phenomenon. The ecosystem of cyber-security has to counter a wide range of digital threats, the causes and impacts of which are rarely very clear. There are countless data and statistics on the issue, which further exacerbates the confusion. This article compares the conceptualization of cyber-criminality in a heterogeneous sample of organizations working in cyber-security, based on a content analysis of 13 reports on cyber-criminality, produced by the same number of organizations for the year 2014. Several elements are compared, including the operational definitions used, the typologies of cyber-threats measured, the concepts addressed that are similar to cyber-criminality, the methodologies used, and the predictions made. The results suggest that despite shared concerns surrounding this issue, the definitions of key concepts in the reports, the typologies of cyber-threats and the predictive trends vary widely.

Go to the article on Cairn-int.info