Crime risks of three-dimensional virtual environments

Three-dimensional virtual environments (3dves) are the new generation of digital multi-user social networking platforms. Their immersive character allows users to create a digital humanised representation or avatar, enabling a degree of virtual interaction not possible through conventional text-based internet technologies. As recent international experience demonstrates, in addition to the conventional range of cybercrimes (including economic fraud, the dissemination of child pornography and copyright violations), the 'virtual-reality' promoted by 3dves is the source of great speculation and concern over a range of specific and emerging forms of crime and harm to users. This paper provides some examples of the types of harm currently emerging in 3dves and suggests internal regulation by user groups, terms of service, or end-user licensing agreements, possibly linked to real-world criminological principles. This paper also provides some directions for future research aimed at understanding the role of Australian criminal law and the justice system more broadly in this emerging field.

Australian police responses to transnational crime and terrorism

This chapter outlines the Australian federal policing and allied agency responses to international drug trafficking activity and terrorism. The chapter is situated alongside a broader analysis of the structure of each key agency and the various interagency enforcement mechanisms established domestically and internationally to improve enforcement performance.

Mining multi-modal crime patterns at different levels of granularity using hierarchical clustering

The appearance of patterns could be found in different modalities of a domain, where the different modalities refer to the data sources that constitute different aspects of a domain. Particularly, the domain of our discussion refers to crime and the different modalities refer to the different data sources such as offender data, weapon data, etc. in crime domain. In addition, patterns also exist in different levels of granularity for each modality. In order to have a thorough understanding a domain, it is important to reveal the hidden patterns through the data explorations at different levels of granularity and for each modality. Therefore, this paper presents a new model for identifying patterns that exist in different levels of granularity for different modes of crime data. A hierarchical clustering approach - growing self organising maps (GSOM) has been deployed. Furthermore, the model is enhanced with experiments that exhibit the significance of exploring data at different granularities.

What is crime? Who is the criminal?

The term "crime" is often "taken-for-granted" and poorly defined in contemporary Australian and International research. There is also considerable debate amongst scholars working in different theoretical tranditions about the appropriate definition of crime. This reflects broader public division about the types of behaviour or people that are classed as criminal.

Editorial : advances in network and system security

Current parallel and distributed networks/systems are facing serious threats from network terrorism and crime, which cause huge financial loss and potential life hazard. As attacking tools are becoming more widely available, more easy-to-use, more sophisticated, and more powerful, more efforts have been made in building more effective, more intelligent, and more adaptive defense systems which are of distributed and networked nature. This special issue focuses on issues related to Network and System Security, such as authentication, access control, availability, integrity, privacy, confidentiality, dependability and sustainability of computer networks and systems.

A survey on latest botnet attack and defense

A botnet is a group of compromised computers, which are remotely controlled by hackers to launch various network attacks, such as DDoS attack and information phishing. Botnet has become a popular and productive tool behind many cyber attacks. Recently, the owners of some botnets, such as storm worm, torpig and conflicker, are employing fluxing techniques to evade detection. Therefore, the understanding of their fluxing tricks is critical to the success of defending from botnet attacks. Motivated by this, we survey the latest botnet attacks and defenses in this paper. We begin with introducing the principles of fast fluxing (FF) and domain fluxing (DF), and explain how these techniques were employed by botnet owners to fly under the radar. Furthermore, we investigate the state-of-art research on fluxing detection. We also compare and evaluate those fluxing detection methods by multiple criteria. Finally, we discuss future directions on fighting against botnet based attacks.