Abstracts of Current Research

From Crime to Hypercrime: Evolving Threats and Law Enforcement's New Mandate in the AI Age

The paper examines the trajectory of crime, tracing its evolution from traditional forms to digital manifestations in cybercrime, and proposes "Hypercrime" as the latest frontier. Leveraging insights from Michael McGuire's "Hypercrime: The New Geometry of Harm," the study calls for a paradigm shift in law enforcement strategies to meet the challenges posed by AI-driven hypercrime. Emphasis is placed on understanding hypercrime's complexity, developing proactive policies, and embracing technological tools to mitigate risks associated with AI misuse.

Building a Resilient Cybersecurity Posture: A Framework for Leveraging Prevent, Detect, and Respond Functions and Law Enforcement Collaboration

This research paper investigates the three fundamental functions of cybersecurity: prevent, detect, and respond, and proposes a framework for building a cybersecurity strategy that leverages these functions. The paper emphasises the significance of each function and their interdependency in creating an effective cybersecurity posture. The prevent function aims to mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks by implementing proactive security measures, while the detect function focuses on identifying ongoing cyber threats. The respond function is designed to minimise the impact of a cyber-attack and recover normal operations as quickly as possible.

Moreover, this paper proposes a framework for building a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that aligns with business objectives and emphasises the need for regular monitoring and evaluation of cybersecurity measures. The framework emphasises the importance of integrating the prevent, detect, and respond functions and leveraging them to provide a holistic approach to cybersecurity.

Furthermore, this paper highlights the role and benefits of law enforcement collaboration in the respond function of cybersecurity. Law enforcement agencies can provide additional resources and expertise in handling cyber-attacks, as well as assist in investigations and legal actions against
cybercriminals. Collaboration between law enforcement agencies and organisations can enhance the effectiveness of the respond function and strengthen the overall cybersecurity posture.

In summary, this research paper emphasises the significance of a proactive and comprehensive approach to cybersecurity that integrates the prevent, detect, and respond functions, and highlights the benefits of law enforcement collaboration in the respond function. The proposed framework provides a roadmap for organisations to create a robust cybersecurity posture that aligns with their business objectives and protects against cyber threats.

Towards a Contemporary Definition of Cybersecurity

The report provides an intricate analysis of cyber security defined in contemporary operational digital environments. An  extensive literature review is formed to determine how the construct is reviewed in modern scholarly contexts. The article seeks to offer a comprehensive definition of the term "cybersecurity" to accentuate its multidisciplinary perspectives. A meaningful concise, and inclusive dimension will be provided to assist in designing scholarly discourse on the subject. The report will offer a unified framework for examining activities that constitute the concept resulting in a new definition;

"Cybersecurity is the collection and concerting of resources including personnel and infrastructure, structures, and processes to protect networks and cyber-enabled computer systems from events that compromise the integrity and interfere with property rights, resulting in some extent of loss."

The encapsulation of the interdisciplinary domains will be critical in improving understanding and response to emerging challenges in the cyberspace.

The report provides an intricate analysis of cyber security defined in contemporary operational digital environments. An  extensive literature review is formed to determine how the construct is reviewed in modern scholarly contexts. The article seeks to offer a comprehensive definition of the term "cybersecurity" to accentuate its multidisciplinary perspectives. A meaningful concise, and inclusive dimension will be provided to assist in designing scholarly discourse on the subject. The report will offer a unified framework for examining activities that constitute the concept resulting in a new definition;

Privacy and Security of Cognitive Augmentation in Policing

The rapid technological advancements of recent years have had a tremendous and multifaceted impact on society, leading to innovations such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the advent of intelligent environments. Through these new intelligent environments, continuous streams of telemetry data are recorded, allowing users to remotely monitor and adjust their devices and enabling the automatic invocation of sensor/actuator processes, for on-the-fly adjustment of environmental conditions. This, coupled with research developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), open the way for new and innovative ways through which users and intelligent environments could interact. One such human-environment interaction method that has gained some traction in recent years is automatic cognitive-based interface, where brain-waves are captured through specialised hardware, processed and translated in formats that can be processed by controller, sensor, actuator and computer systems. Police can take advantage of IoT-derived data for processing.

The first contribution introduces a cognitive augmentation framework, which identifies the relevant research and technologies, and explains its application amidst real world use cases in policing. The second contribution proposes AI-enabled EEG model, namely Cognitive Privacy to safeguard data and identifies users and their tasks from EEG data. The data is protected from disclosure using normalised correlation analysis and classifies subjects and their tasks using a long-short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning technique. The third contribution presents a new Cognitive Computing-enabled Convolution Neural Network (CC-CNN) model, that allows the classification of incidents into crime categories and their associated criminal acts. The proposed CC-CNN model can be used by investigators to gain a better understanding of crimes by processing written statements and witness accounts.

Internet of Things Enabled Policing Processes

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform many industries. This includes harnessing real-time intelligence to improve risk-based decision making and supporting adaptive processes from core to edge. For example, modern police investigation processes are often extremely complex, data-driven and knowledge-intensive. In such processes, it is not sufficient to focus on data storage and data analysis; as the knowledge workers (e.g., police investigators) will need to collect, understand and relate the big data (scattered across various systems) to process analysis. In this thesis, we analyze the state of the art in knowledge-intensive and data-driven processes. We present a scalable and extensible IoT-enabled process data analytics pipeline to enable analysts ingest data from IoT devices, extract knowledge from this data and link them to process execution data. We focus on a motivating scenario in policing, where a criminal investigator will be augmented by smart devices to collect data and to identify devices around the investigation location, to communicate with them to understand and analyze evidence. We design and implement a system (namely iCOP, IoT-enabled COP) to assist investigators collect large amounts of evidence and dig for the facts in an easy way.