Principal Investigator: Professor R Anderson
Research Institution: University of Cambridge
Grant Information: EP/M020320/1
Project Summary:
The Cambridge Interdisciplinary Centre for Crime in the Cloud (CICCC) will include researchers with expert knowledge in computer science, criminology, cybersecurity, economics, psychology, forensics and law based in the Institute of Criminology, the Faculty of Law and the Computer Laboratory.
The principal aim of the centre is to create a sustainable and internationally competitive centre for academic research into cybercrime with the intention of improving security for cloud service users and outcomes for those who would be affected by misuse of the service. The centre intends to achieve this using big data research, in which it has negotiated very large datasets including spam email messages and cloud service operations, leading it to having the largest online abuse data resource available anywhere outside of classified systems. The analysis of these datasets will enable a greater understanding of crime in the cloud including the ability to devise identifiers of criminality; to build systems that can detect when crime occurs; and to collect evidence of wrongdoings within the cloud.
This research will provide police with an improved ability to search large amounts of data and better developed mechanisms for evidence. Industry will also be provided with data to allow contributors to improve cloud service security to users. The research centre will also work closely with other non-affiliated academics and hence enable them to get access to real data, overcoming the major problem most academics face when doing research on cybercrime.
The proposed start date of the project is the beginning of October 2015.
