Toward a cybercrime classification ontology: A knowledge-based approach

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increase in cybercrimes and its negative impacts on the lives of individuals, organizations, and governments. It has been argued that a better understanding of cybercrime is a necessary condition to develop appropriate legal and policy responses to cybercrime. While a universally agreed-upon classification scheme would facilitate the development of such understanding and also collaborations, current classification schemes are insufficient, fragmented and often incompatible since each focuses on different perspectives (e.g., role of the computer, attack, attacker's or defender's viewpoint), or uses varying terminologies to refer to the same thing, making consistent cybercrime classifications improbable. In this paper we present and illustrate a new cybercrime ontology that incorporates multiple perspectives and offers a more holistic viewpoint for cybercrime classification than prior works. It should therefore prove to be a more useful tool for cybercrime stakeholders.