Understanding the people who are targets of cybercrime, the motives of the crooks and the technical components of the attacks will be the focus of an international conference at Michigan State University that features well-known speakers from Arizona to England.
The March 17 event, open to the public, will bring together researchers from the social and technical fields to make a larger impact on understanding the problem of cybercrime and how it can be solved.
“Cybercrime is not just a technical problem,” said Thomas Holt, conference coordinator and associate professor in MSU’s School of Criminal Justice. “It is also a human problem because people are responsible for errors that enable attacks or are directly harmed by the outcome of an attack.”
The third-annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Cybercrime will be held at the Henry Center.
Holt said the idea is to find interdisciplinary solutions to cybercrime that take into account as many of the factors involved in the crime as possible.
“We will have a lot of diversity on the social science track, with talks on everything from the relationship between cybersecurity behavior and cybercrime behavior to the use of technology by law enforcement,” Holt said.
Speakers include Terrance Berg, U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Michigan; Alice Hutchings, criminologist at the University of Cambridge in England; and Gail-Joon Ahn, professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University.
A list of speakers and their bios is here.
The conference is made up of 50-minute panels in which two speakers will have about 20-25 minutes each. Attendees can gain seven hours of continuing professional education (CPE) credit.
The event is $25 per person; register here. Students can attend for free, though space is limited to the first 50 students who register.
“There are a lot of technical conferences that may have a talk or two on human issues, and there are a lot of social science conferences that may only have one or two sessions on cybercrime with minimal focus on computer science perspectives,” Holt said. “By bringing them together we stand a better chance of understanding how our fields complement one another and can improve on our knowledge of cybercrime threats and how to research them.”
