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Exploring public cybercrime prevention campaigns and victimization of businesses

Dr. Steven Kemp

Cybercrime is a pressing concern for governments and businesses around the globe, but little is known about what policy interventions work to prevent and mitigate threats to organizations. Thus, empirical studies on cybercrime prevention policies and tools are needed to understand their effectiveness and to improve implementation and evaluation. This presentation analyzes whether two UK government schemes aimed at encouraging and helping businesses to adopt cybersecurity controls and policies ('Cyber Essentials’ and ‘10 Steps to Cyber Security’) are associated with safer organizational behavior and whether adopting the recommended measures is related to lower levels of cybercrime victimization and its impacts. To this end, Bayesian model averaging was employed on a representative sample of 5,872 businesses from four rounds (2018–2021) of the UK Government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey. The results show that awareness of the Government schemes is associated with more cyber secure practices, but we do not find evidence of lower likelihood of victimization or negative consequences for companies that implement the recommended measures. These findings will be discussed in greater depth and in relation to policy, practice and future research."

Steven Kemp is Serra Hunter Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Girona, Spain. He was previously a recipient of the national Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship in Spain. His research interests include economic cybercrime trends, victimisation, reporting and prevention with regard to both individuals and businesses. His recent work has been published in Computers & Security, British Journal of Criminology, Criminology & Criminal Justice, European Journal of Criminology, amongst others.