Bridging Information Security and Environmental Criminology Research to Better Mitigate Cybercrime

Cybercrime is a complex phenomenon that spans both technical and human. As such, two disjoint areas have been studying the problem from angles: the information security community and the environmental one. Despite the large body of work produced by these communities the past years, the two research efforts have largely remained disjoint, researchers on one side not benefitting from the advancements proposed by other. In this paper, we argue that it would be beneficial for the security community to look at the theories and systematic developed in environmental criminology to develop better mitigations cybercrime. To this end, we provide an overview of the research from criminology and how it has been applied to cybercrime. We then some of the research proposed in the information security domain, explicit parallels between the proposed mitigations and environmental theories, and presenting some examples of new mitigations against. Finally, we discuss the concept of cyberplaces and propose a in order to define them. We discuss this as a potential research, taking into account both fields of research, in the hope of interdisciplinary efforts in cybercrime research.