Cyber Crime Assessment

In physical crime the concepts of crime scene assessment and offender profiling are well-accepted if occasionally controversial. Work by the FBI has put profiling into the mainstream of investigative theories. However, in the digital world no such progress has been made. Further, the notion of offender profiling addresses the psychological continuum whereas we are concerned with the criminological spectrum. The ongoing research reported in this paper will begin the process of translating physical crime scene assessment techniques into digital practice. The potential benefits of accomplishing this successfully are significant. Unfortunately, the translation between physical investigation and digital investigation is not straightforward. The addition of particular techniques pioneered by crime assessment experts in physical investigations has turned out to be far more promising than application of psychological profiling. This research-in-progress paper presents a new approach to cyber crime assessment. It views the computer as the crime scene and it applies a crime typology.