The Strategic Seductions of Cybercrime in 21st Century Geopolitics
Talk by Professor Andrew Goldsmith, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia.
This paper explores several dimensions of the recent convergence between the realms of cybercrime and geopolitics. Why is it, it might be asked, that cybercriminals who are famously motivated by the pursuit of profit, can be drawn also into forms of hybrid warfare? Our thesis is that cybercrime present a valuable set of tools, methods and organisational forms in the pursuit contemporary geopolitical agendas. The examples of Russia and North Korea are examined, to consider a range of cybercriminal tools but particularly those of ransomware and cryptocurrency heists. The theme of ‘seduction’ in this context builds on earlier work (Goldsmith and Brewer 2015; Goldsmith and Wall 2022) on ‘drift’ and ‘seduction’. Both concepts focus on the affordances of cybercrime technologies that not only enable, but also invite and encourage, their use for illegal purposes. In the present paper, it is suggested that these features similarly apply to political/ideologically motivated cybercrimes as to economically motivated cybercrimes.
Andrew Goldsmith Bio
Andrew Goldsmith is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He is also a Visiting Fellow in the School of Global Regulation and Justice at the Australian National University, Canberra and Distinguished Fellow of the Social Cyber and Technology Institute, Canberra. His long-term research interests have been in the fields of criminology and the sociology of law, most recently in transnational crime and policing and cybercrime. After undergraduate studies in law in Adelaide and working briefly in legal practice, he completed postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom (LSE) and Canada (University of Toronto). He has taught at universities in the UK (Brunel, Warwick), Canada (Toronto) and Australia (Monash, Wollongong, Flinders).