Miranda Bruce, a PhD student in the School of Sociology, RSSS, has been hired on as a postdoc for the Human Cybercrime Project with Oxford University. The aim of the project is to investigate where cybercrime hubs are in the world and how they are ranked by experts in cybercrime attribution and intelligence. The data will one day be developed into a metric for assessing existing cybercrime hubs, why these hubs have emerged, and potentially then predicting where hubs will arise in the future.

CRIMGOV aims to rethink the concept of organized crime. It will develop a new framework that distinguishes key activities of OC groups and to study a broad range of organized crime in depth: local cybercrime production hubs, the international trade of drugs, and the emergence of criminal governance inside and outside prisons. The project will produce high quality data sets that are hard to collect and time-consuming to code, a challenging and risky yet highly rewarding contribution to knowledge. Breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and adopting a global outlook, CRIMGOV will overturn long-held theoretical approaches, produce substantial new findings and data, and speak to scholars across different disciplines. Miranda will be co-producing an international index of cybercriminality that can be used for research, policy decisions, and a better understanding of the geography of cybercrime.