Towards a new quantitative analysis of cybercrime offences by themes and degrees in French security forces data

• In Event: Advances in quantitative methods 3

Abstract

In order to answer to the growing needs of managing the response of law enforcement agencies against cybercrime, but also to grasp a better picture of this phenomenon, The French Ministerial Statistical Department for Internal Security leads a work to improve the analysis of “Digital Offences “ thanks to an update of the methodology to classify procedural data from security forces.
A first point highlighted in this work concerns the vocabulary used to designate this field of crime. Indeed, within the security forces, the definition of “cybercrime” and what it covers for data seizure in the complaints drafting software differs from one person to another. Moreover, the exploratory phase and the scope definition of this new indicator pointed out a very broad field of offences committed, but above all different degrees of digital means use in the commission of an offence. These initial findings have therefore led us to use the expression “digital offences” to designate the offence scope of this new variable rather than “cybercrime”.
In order to improve analysis, the new indicator will go beyond a simple binary definition “cyber vs non-cyber”. The data from French security forces will be analysed under 5 themes which are scam, personal injury, public order offences, copyrights infringement and the failure to comply with dedicated digital regulations. As well the reality of how these offences are committed thanks to digital means is strongly different. The level of expertise needed to commit a ransomware attack is more elaborated than to commit a romance scam offence. Then the way to identify degrees of the use of digital means inside procedural data from french security forces will be questioned. This new grid is close to typologies developed in the literature on digital offences field of study.

Author

• Zoe Gallos, French ministry of Interior