Bots,cops, and corporations: on the limits of enforcement and the promise of polycentric regulation as a way to control large-scale cybercrime

Botnets currently pose the most serious threat to the digital ecosystem, providing an infrastructure that enables bank fraud, distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and click fraud. During the past few years, three main approaches have been used to fight botnets. First, police organizations have periodically arrested prominent hackers and scammers, hoping such high-profile operations would have a deterrent effect. Second, Microsoft has performed a number of takedowns, using an innovative blend of legal and technical means that attempt to disrupt botnet operations and reduce their profitability. Third, some countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany – encourage harm reduction strategies that rely on public-private partnerships involving internet service providers, anti-virus companies, and regulatory authorities. This article describes these three approaches (incapacitation, disruption, and harm reduction), the challenges they face, and their respective effectiveness in protecting the digital ecosystem from large-scale online harm.     

Analysis of Ethical Leadership and Integrity Development in Local Government: The United States,The Netherlands,Montenegro, and Serbia

This research seeks to understand influences on local government integrity development as a control of corruption. Using survey data from public managers in local governments in The Netherlands, Serbia, Montenegro, and the United States, we examined three main areas: integrity policy, leadership, and organizational ethical climate. An important finding was that integrity policy comes from an indirect leadership effect that remains focused on a structural response as the primary source of ethical reasoning more than normative control. Clarity of decisions, consistency in the process of decision-making, and support for anticorruption efforts can be enhanced with a balanced approach to corruption control.     

Investigating mobility patterns for repetitive sexual contact in adult child sex offending

In the present study, geographic mobility exhibited by child sex offenders was examined. Geographic mobility was defined as the use of multiple locations to obtain repetitive sexual contact with the same victim. The sample consisted of 77 adult offenders convicted for having committed a sexual offence against a child, and who agreed to provide confidential self-report data concerning their offending behaviours. Based on a set of offence characteristics, offenders who used a single location were compared to offenders who used multiple locations for sexual contact. Results showed that offenders who used multiple locations are more likely to isolate the victim, use violence, involve the victim in several sexual episodes, abuse the victim for a period exceeding one year, and make the victim participate and perform sexual behaviours on them during sexual episodes. Examining more closely offenders who used multiple locations for abuse, three offence patterns were further identified (i.e., familial-low mobility offence, non familial-high mobility offence, and familial-high mobility offence). Going for a car ride was also found to be a common location/situation used in the familial-low mobility offence subgroup, while the use of outdoor locations on a regular basis was found to be rare in high mobility patterns subgroups.