In our highly digitalized society, cybercrime has become a common crime. However, because research into cybercriminals is in its infancy, our knowledge about cybercriminals is still limited. One of the main considerations is whether cybercriminals have higher intellectual capabilities than traditional criminals or even the general population. Although criminological studies clearly show that traditional criminals have lower intellectual capabilities, little is known about the relationship between cybercrime and intelligence. The current study adds to the literature by exploring the relationship between CITO-test scores and cybercrime in the Netherlands. The CITO final test is a standardized test for primary school students - usually taken at the age of 11 or 12 - and highly correlated with IQ-scores. Data from Statistics Netherlands were used to compare CITO-test scores of 143 apprehended cybercriminals with those of 143 apprehended traditional criminals and 143 non-criminals, matched on age, sex, and country of birth. Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses were used to compare CITO test scores between cybercriminals, traditional criminals, and non-criminals. Additionally, a discordant sibling design was used to control for unmeasured confounding by family factors. Findings reveal that cybercriminals have significantly higher CITO test scores compared to traditional criminals and significantly lower CITO test scores compared to non-criminals.
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This paper investigates the prospective application of arbitration by Transnational Private Regulation (TPR). It builds on the study of TPR developed by Fabrizio Cafaggi et al. TPR addresses the ever-increasing transfer of regulatory power from national to global levels, and from public to private regulators. TPR entails private regulatory co-operation be-yond the jurisdictional boundaries of States through voluntary standards. The regimes of TPR are built by a variety of actors, such as companies, NGOs, independent experts, and epistemic communities. Examples of TPR can be found in food safety, forestry management, trade, and derivatives, among other fields. More specifically, they concern private actors engaging in transnational coordination of standard setting such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that was developed to foster responsible management of the world’s forests. There are four main characteristics of TPR: legitimacy, quality, effectiveness, and enforcement. I will describe those four characteristics in brief here. First, the legitimacy of TPR is built around consent through voluntary entry, participation, and exit of regulated entities. Important to this contribution is that the legitimacy of TPR goes beyond its legal dimension, measured by purely legal standards. Hence, the legitimacy of TPR is largely determined by standards developed by social and economic institutions relevant to specific TPR regimes. The role of those institutions in standard settings is higher in private TPR regimes than private-public TPR regimes, where some forms of compliance are mandatory. Second, the quality of TPR corresponds to the ex ante and ex post evaluation cycle of regulatory processes. It is also linked with the transparency of TPR. Third, the effectiveness of TPR is measured according to the extent to which the objectives of TPR (or selected TPR regimes) are met. And finally, enforcement of TPRis understood as ‘ensuring compliance with commitments’. Enforcement of TPR can take place through courts, administrative agencies, and private dispute resolution—including the arbitration at the core of this contribution. Cafaggi’s study identified rather selective use of arbitration in TPR, but also recommended changes to make arbitration law more adaptable to TPR. Furthermore, the study recommended that more specialized dispute resolution institutions are created to exclusively serve TPR. Against this background, I shift the main focus of analysis from TPR to arbitration. Whereas Cafaggi argued that arbitration may be suitable for TPR as a means of private enforcement, in this paper I go even further, arguing that arbitration as a means of informal, out-of-court dispute resolution is well suited to strengthen the normativity of TPR. This is so because private arbitration actors (including, inter alia, arbitrators and arbitral institutions) are already equipped with the tools necessary to facilitate cross-border TPR, which is done through informal standards and procedures with origins in the communitarian values and reputational mechanisms used by different communities before the development of modern States. The roots of most private justice regimes—including arbitration—are informed by communitarian values such as collaboration, participation, and personal trust. Those values, together with other core characteristics of arbitration correspond to all core characteristics of TPR, making both systems comparable and complementary. The analytical framework incorporated in this paper follows the four core characteristics of TPR. Hence, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section contains the introduction. In the second section, I analyze the legitimacy of arbitration vis-à-vis the legitimacy of TPR. In the third section, I investigate the accountability of arbitration as a means of quality signaling vis-à-vis TPR. In the fourth section, I focus on the remedies available to arbitrators in a view of TPR’s effectiveness. Finally, in the fifth section, I analyze enforcement through arbitration and its impact on the exclusiveness versus complementarity of TPR regimes. Conclusions follow, including recommendations for future research. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
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Prior research on network attacks is predominantly technical, yet little is known about behavioral patterns of attackers inside computer systems. This study adopts a criminological perspective to examine these patterns, with a particular focus on data thieves targeting organizational networks. By conducting interviews with cybersecurity experts and applying crime script analysis, we developed a comprehensive script that describes the typical progression of attackers through organizational systems and networks in order to eventually steal data. This script integrates phases identified in previous academic literature and expert-defined phases that resemble phases from industry threat models. However, in contrast to prior cybercrime scripts and industry threat models, we did not only identify sequential phases, but also illustrate the circular nature of network attacks. This finding challenges traditional perceptions of crime as a linear process. In addition, our findings underscore the importance of considering both successful and failed attacks in cybercrime research to develop more effective cybersecurity strategies.
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