The Devil Drives a Lada: The Social Construction of Hackers as the Cybercriminal

A senior police officer recently described to me a serious dilemma that he had just faced. The officer had received reliable intelligence that a serious financial crime had been committed by an East European Mafia group using a computer located within his police force area. Early one morning, anticipating stiff resistance, he sent an armed unit to the house containing the computer. After breaking down the door, his officers were shocked to find a sleepy breakfasting family, rather than the violent mafia gang they had expected to meet. On this occasion, the police had chosen the wrong course of action, because the family’s computer had been infected by malicious software and used remotely by fraudsters as part of a botnet (robot network).

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