ABSTRACT
The second chapter discusses the patterns of cyber-crime victimisation, types of victims and roles of victims and perpetrators in causation of cyber victimisation and profiles of the victims. With the development of time, patterns of cyber-crimes have expanded. They are no longer confined to the concept of cyber espionage, unauthorised access to military computers, or copyright violation of songs and movies. Data has become the costliest property any government, company, or a human being may have. The cyber-crime victimisation pattern now includes data theft and illegal trading of data over the dark net. States are increasingly becoming victims of terrorism including cyberterrorism. Organised criminal gangs are targeting public transport and public properties. Before States can take preventive actions, the terrorist groups are able to access all information related to their civil aviation system and locate vulnerable places and people where predictive policing is less. They are able to run parallel governments and have a very strong web presence. They can manipulate the political maps available on the internet. They run web-based recruiting systems for drawing innocent individuals into their devastating hate propaganda campaigns. They use artificial intelligence to manipulate the emotional intelligence of people. Companies, on the other hand, are trying to build stronger infrastructure to secure the sensitive personal data of their customers and their own company secrets. However, they have to face the challenges of cybersecurity. Competition is no longer confined to the concept of market monopoly: companies are now competing with each other on the issue of business analysis and mapping of the consumers' mindsets for preference in products, brands and budgets. Several companies also contain multiple layers of stakeholders for producing and marketing the internet of things. While such stuffs make the lives of people in the contemporary world more comfortable, this further generates huge data that needs more protection from the app creators, product manufacturers, and dealers that are in direct contact with the consumers. All these stakeholders have been continuously targeted by perpetrators for ransom attacks on millions of data. They are victimised both by the perpetrators and the criminal justice system, as they are liable to pay compensation for their failure to protect the confidential information of their customers. Different individuals experience different patterns of cyber-crime victimisation. It can be online hate propaganda, economic fraud, sexual offences, hacking, and so on. While the State and companies can afford to protect their legal liabilities, the average individual may not even be able to convince the police about the occurrence of the crime. Either they may not be digitally empowered, or they may not be sufficiently financially empowered to gather evidence to convince the criminal justice machineries about their plight. This chapter discusses these aspects of cyber victimisation and provides a profile of the victims based on available data on cyber-crime victimisation from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia.
