'Cybercrime Through an Ecological Lens': Professor Benoît Dupont

This hybrid seminar co-hosted by the UNSW Centre for Crime, Law and Justice (CCLJ) and the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation will take place in-person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (level 2 staff boardroom) and online via Teams. Please indicate your attendance preference on checkout.

Cybercrime remains a puzzle. While human societies are in the midst of a Digital Revolution that is proving as transformative and disruptive as the two Industrial Revolutions that preceded it, the complex problem of how to safeguard new emerging techno-social assemblages against a broad range of manufactured online risks and harms proves extremely challenging. This presentation proposes to adopt an ecological approach to analyze the cybercrime ecosystem and its interdependencies.

This approach breaks down the ecosystem into three discrete but interconnected communities that each display very different goals, capacities and rationalities: the industrial, criminal and security communities. These communities comprise organizational actors that range from multinational corporations to criminal networks, public law enforcement organizations and NGOs. The interactions within each community and between communities mainly belong to one of the three following categories: competitive, predatory and cooperative interactions. The application of these ecological concepts to emerging techno-social assemblages can help us identify intervention and regulatory strategies to address the growing cybercrime problem.

Speaker:

Benoît Dupont is a Professor of Criminology at the Université de Montréal as well as the Canada Research Chair for Cybersecurity and the Research Chair for the Prevention of Cybercrime. In 2021, he successfully launched the Human-Centric Cybersecurity Partnership, a network of interdisciplinary scholars working in close collaboration with industry, government and non-profit partners. Professor Dupont also serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Cyber Thread Exchange. Professor Dupont researches the ecology of cybercrime. He studies the organizational and technological aspects of governance in the public and private security sectors, the social and entrepreneurial organization of online offenders, and examines how emerging cyber-security policies can contribute to the prevention, control and mitigation of online harms.