Criminology & Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2758
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Item The Restrictive Deterrent Effect of Warning Messages on the Behavior of Computer System Trespassers(2014) Jones, Harriet Mary; Maimon, David; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Computer system trespassing is a growing concern, but it has received little criminological attention. The present study discusses the results of an experiment which looked at system trespasser behavior after exposure to one of three warning messages (or no message) in the context of deterrence theory. One message consisted of an attempt at moral persuasion; the second a generic legal warning, and the third an ambiguous threat. Keystroke data was analyzed to assess how the type of message affected the employment of restrictive deterrent techniques designed to limit trespasser activity on a compromised system. It was found that moral persuasion generally reduces both the incidence and frequency of command entry by trespassers on an illegally accessed system, while legal and ambiguous warnings produce no significant differences from the control condition. This suggests that in order to reduce trespasser activity, system administrators should use moral persuasion instead of legal sanction threats.Item Restrictive Deterrence and the Severity of Hackers' Attacks on Compromised Computer Systems(2014) Wilson II, Theodore Henry; Maimon, David; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There is a lack of consensus within the literature assessing whether surveillance is effective in reducing the seriousness of criminal events, with almost no prior study investigating its operation in cyberspace. This thesis seeks to address both of these domains while drawing on the deterrence perspective. Data were obtained from an experiment conducted over seven months at a large, public university within the United States. Specifically, a series of virtual computers with known vulnerabilities were deployed into the university's computer network as part of a randomized controlled trial. This thesis seeks to examine 1) whether a surveillance banner reduces the severity of offending through inhibiting hackers from escalating to active engagement with the system upon gaining access on the first session and 2) whether the deterrent effect of a surveillance banner persists beyond the first session. This surveillance banner produced a restrictive deterrent effect for the first and second sessions.