The first chapter will present, define, and explain the two main concepts of the book: Dark Tetrad personalities and cybercrime and cyber misconduct. It will first elaborate on the main characteristics of each personality in the Dark Tetrad. The following section presents the primary forms of cyber misconduct and cybercrime and their adverse outcomes. The chapter concludes by presenting some leading theories explaining why Dark Tetrad personalities are attracted to social media networks.

The chapter will cover one of the most critical and devastating issues in cyber abuse, namely cybercrime. The chapter will start by describing the different forms of cybercrime, such as cyber hacking, cyberattacks, phishing, insurance fraud, online consumer fraud, and more. The chapter will continue by presenting theories regarding the reasons behind the motivations that lead each Dark Tetrad personality to commit cybercrimes. The final section of the chapter will present findings about the relationship between each Dark Tetrad trait and the different forms of cybercrime.

The chapter gives a detailed account of inter-state corporations in combatting cybercrime and its limitations. The chapter situates the current negotiations of a new legal instrument to counter cybercrime within the UN’s historical framework of efforts to enhance co-operation against general organised crime and cybercrime. In particular, it analyses the main issues that have held back progress in enhancing co-operation. It then proceeds to examine the current negotiation process and the prospects for effective co-operation once the negotiations come to an end, highlighting the potentially impactful legal implications of the work of the UN ad hoc committee on cybercrime.

This chapter explores the phenemonon of private criminal dispositions, more commonly known as vigilante justice. It first examines the various definitions of vigilantism, noting that the term used in this book – “private criminal dispositions” – is a very broad category that includes legal and illegal actions. It then reviews different types of private criminal dispositions, including removing a benefit or privilege (often used by retail stores or employers), public shaming (often used against sexual predators), property damage (often used against computer hackers), and, finally, acts of violence, including deadly force.The chapter concludes with a number of case studies of this final type of private criminal disposition, including the Kyle Rittenhouse case and the Ahmaud Arbery murder.

The growth of cybercrime, social media misuse and online intellectual property infringement discussed in the preceding three chapters presents new and significant challenges for regulating these aspects of technology law. Conducting investigations, determining jurisdictional scope and prosecuting offences all require a degree of adaptation, as compared to traditional areas of the law. The contrast between investigating a robbery from a bricks-and-mortar store on the one hand and the hacking of an e-commerce company’s trade secrets is vast.

In recent decades, the regulation of technology and associated information has become an important and topical area of law, relevant to almost all aspects of society. Issues in technology law typically extend beyond specific jurisdictions and have state, national and international implications. Developments in one jurisdiction rapidly have international ramifications, due to the connectedness facilitated by the internet and modern communications technology. The areas of the law that are evolving due to technological developments are diverse: a preliminary list would include finance law, criminal law, medical law, media law and privacy law. New technology creates challenges, because when it becomes available, new regulatory gaps arise. For example, the emergence of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has required public agencies to issue guidelines as to whether they constitute forms of currency, and whether dealings using them are subject to taxation laws.1 Another example is the legislation enacted in the early 2000s to regulate the use of DNA evidence in criminal investigations. When these laws were enacted, the use of commercial ancestry databases and other modern techniques in genetic analysis to identify suspects in some high-profile contemporary cases was not envisaged.2

One of the more challenging intersections of law and technology is the use of computers and associated systems to commit criminal offences. While terminology varies, the neologism cybercrime is widely used to refer to a range of offending that involves computers as targets (eg hacking); as instruments (eg online fraud and forgery); or as incidental to the commission of a crime (eg using the internet to plan or organise a more conventional crime).1 As noted in Chapter 2, some cybercrimes are essentially the same as their ‘terrestrial’ counterparts, but adopt modern technology for their commission (ie ‘old wine in new bottles’), while others represent significantly newer forms of criminality. Examples of the former might include cyberstalking and online fraud, where the message is much the same but the means of communication is more efficient; while the latter might include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.

The concluding chapter reflects on Tilley’s call for a middle-range radical realism for crime prevention and then outlines some of what the authors believe will be forces, trends and developments that shape crime prevention policy and practice in the coming years. It focuses on potential trends and forces shaping and impacting crime prevention, cybercrime, 'big data', nudging for prevention, prevention science, and crime prevention as a human service.

The chapter introduces and explains some terms and concepts that are important for the understanding of the international legal questions with regard to transnational cybersecurity, such as hacking and software vulnerabilities, exploits, phishing, ransomware, or botnets. Furthermore, some basic categories like espionage, cybercrime, or cyberterrorism are laid out in order to distinguish the most prevalent forms of malicious behaviour in cyberspace and to conceptually prepare the subsequent focus on adversarial state conduct in cyberspace.

This chapter opens with a brief typology of cyber conflict encapsulating cybercrime, espionage, war, and terrorism. The examination then moves on to investigate first how and why these categories are breaking down in the Information Age, and second what comparative approaches to regulating cyberspace and managing cyber conflict exist as juxtaposed against other global collective action problems. The tragedy of the unmanaged commons scenario, from which many collective action problems derive, predicts the overexploitation of common pool resources and has, traditionally, been moderated by three management solutions: privatization, nationalization, and common property legal regimes. Accordingly, this chapter introduces each of these concepts and reflects on the potential and limits of these approaches, including the CHM concept that was introduced to govern the deep seabed and the Moon as applied to cyberspace. The debate is then viewed through the lens of polycentric governance generally as well as through an introduction to a range of leading institutional design frameworks, including the Ostrom Design Principles, which are in turn applied to the case studies in Part II.