A New Version of Cybercrime Taxonomy: Empirical Evidence from Finland
A New Version of Cybercrime Taxonomy: Empirical Evidence from Finland

Summary/Abstract: Cybercrime is a discussed issue globally. There is a myth that cybercrimes are all technically advanced. This research developed an extended scale to measure a crime technique of cybercrime and how technology is used to perpetrate a crime against technology or software, or technology and software is used to aid crime. This study used Finnish Court cases to show the need for a revised extension of the taxonomy of the previous cybercrime scale. Finnish Court cases between 2015-2019 were examined with the cybercrime classification scale of a technique of cybercrime and with extended scale. The research dataset included N=527 offenders which are coded from the court documents from combination of cybercrime courts cased and economic crime court cases. The extended scale did give a result that cybercrimes which are regular usage of technical devices. Most offenders are male, and they were targeting mostly not technological devices or software rather they used technology to commit crimes with the aid of technology or software. This study shows that uses taxonomy need revision because of the changing nature of the world of cybersecurity issues of cybercriminality, when cybercrime and cybersecurity issues become more sophisticated, then there is need to revise the taxonomies. This study has given empirical support that cybercriminal can do both the computer is a target of a criminal activity (type I) and the computer is a tool to commit a criminal activity (type II), which previous research have only intuitionally and philosophical discussed. The previous taxonomy did not include metrics for skill level of cybercriminals and this study has created cybercrime scale metrics scoring, which gives more detail what skill level cybercriminals do different type cybercrimes on extended taxonomy.

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