The increasing dependence of modern societies, industries, and individuals on information technology and computer networks renders them ever more vulnerable to attacks on critical IT infrastructures. While the societal threat posed by hackers and other types of cyber-criminals has been growing significantly in the last decade, main-stream criminology has only recently begun to realize the significance of this threat. Cyber-criminology is slowly emerging as a subfield of criminological study and has yet to overcome many of the problems other areas of criminological research have already mastered. Aside from substantial methodological and theoretical problems, cyber-criminology currently also suffers from the scarcity of available data. As a result, scientific answers to crucial questions, such as who exactly the attackers are and why they engage in hacking activities, remain largely fragmentary. The present study begins to fill this remaining gap in the literature. It examines survey data about hackers, their involvement in hacking, their motivations to hack, and their hacking careers. The data for this study was collected during a large hacking convention in Washington D.C. in February 2008. The theoretical framework guiding the analyses is the rational choice perspective (Clarke & Cornish, 1985). Several hypotheses about hackers are derived from the theory and some of its models are transposed into the context of hackers. Results suggest that the rational choice perspective is a viable theory when applied to cyber-criminals. Findings also demonstrate that the creation of more effective countermeasures requires adjustments to our understanding of who hackers really are and why they hack.

This thesis makes two contributions to environmental criminology. The first contribution is a rational choice event model for mobile phone thieves. This is based on interviews with 40 mobile phone thieves. In addition, the deterrent effects of 23 designs of phone are assessed. Comparisons are made between the responses of offenders and non-offenders; and between experienced offenders and less experienced offenders. The results show that mobile phone thieves make discerning choices about which model of phone to steal at the point of theft. The factors affecting handset choice reflect Clarke s (1999) CRAVED characteristics. Mobile phone thieves are differentially deterred by a variety of design solutions, the most effective of which reduce the resale value of stolen handsets. In contrast with offenders, non-offenders are more easily deterred, and statistically significantly more deterred for five of the 23 designs presented in this thesis; do not appreciate the importance of resale value; and are not so aware of the possibilities for circumventing or neutralising security technology. The differences between offender and non-offender responses mean that offenders are arguably best placed to assess product use and misuse in the process of designing-out crime. The second contribution of this thesis is a Mobile Phone Theft Index which controls for phone availability in the absence of handset sales data. Mobile phone theft is arguably a form of pollution (Roman and Farrell, 2002) and can, therefore, be controlled using traditional pollution control instruments (Farrell and Roman, 2006). Informing the public of their risk of victimisation according to handset ownership would make security a marketable aspect of handset design, incentivising industry to decrease theft rates. Industry action to date shows evidence of obstructionism and pre-regulatory initiatives (Newman, 2004) meaning that a novel instrument such as the Index is necessary to alter the current status quo where industry costs UK society an estimated £1.2 billion per year (Mailley and Farrell, 2006).

Building on a growing body of research linking an opportunity framework to drops in acquisitive crime and most recently, acquisitive violence, the present thesis extends this framework to the downward trajectory of nighttime economy violence in England and Wales, during the phenomenon of the crime drop. Using secondary data analysis of the Crime Survey for England and Wales, the rate of stranger and acquaintance violence within the night-time economy is found to have halved between 1995 and 2011/12; mirroring the dramatic declines experienced by other crime types within England and Wales, and more widely across other westernised countries. Disaggregating this overarching trend by offence and victim characteristics reveals a reduction in alcohol-fuelled, common assaults between young males, occurring in and around the drinking venues of the night-time economy, and during weekends, to be the main driver of the drop. Boden, Fergusson and Horwood (2013) argue that to date there is limited knowledge surrounding the nature of alcohol-related violence. The present research explores the nexus between alcohol and violence through a situational lens. The opportunistic nature of night-time economy violence is identified through offenders' choice of tools (weapons) and selection of targets, as well as the clustering of violence along certain spatial, temporal, and individual, dimensions. The opportunity structure of night-time economy violence is established using multivariate modelling techniques designed to isolate the role of opportunity in assault-victimisation, and resultant severity, from the personal characteristics of the actors involved. Measures of a 'risky lifestyle', characterised by an increase in routine activities that take respondents away from the safety of the home, are found to be the strongest predictors of assault victimisation-risk across every available sweep of the survey. A significant shift in population lifestyle - namely a significant net decline in routine engagement with the drinking venues of the night-time economy, as well as a shift in the gender and age composition of drinking venue patronage - co-varies with the decline in night-time economy violence. However, residual effects of respondents' socio-demographic characteristics on victimisation-risk, after mediating for differences in lifestyle, presents violent victimisation in the night-time economy as a result of a process by which personal traits interact with criminogenic environments. Personal characteristics, however, are weaker in their prediction of offence severity in the night-time economy. Rather, the present research supports a collection of research identifying the context of violence to be the strongest predictor of violent dispute escalation (Brennan, Moore & Shepherd, 2010; Marcus and Reio, 2002).

The dissertation discusses topics in environmental criminology, which is concerned with crime in relation to the environment where it occurs. The environmental approach is based upon a premise that occurrence of crime in space is neither random nor uniform. On the contrary, various types and forms of criminal activity tend to concentrate in certain places during certain times. Environmental characteristics play an important role in behaviour of individuals, hence it is possible to analyse them as one of the most important determinants of criminal behaviour. The aim of the thesis is to comprehensively introduce to the Czech and Slovak legal and criminological scholarship historical background, development and the main contemporary theoretical approaches in environmental criminology, as well as their implications and utilization in crime analysis and crime prevention. The theoretical part discusses in detail rational choice perspective, routine activity approach and crime pattern theory as an environmental meta-theory. The analytical part introduces the basics of the methods of crime mapping and geographical profiling. It also demonstrates how statistical and mapping techniques can be utilized in practice, using a set of police data concerning thefts from motor vehicles in Prague during the first...

The opportunity theory for crime is composed of three partial concepts. The first concept is the routine activity theory that works with a potential offender, a suitable target and a capable guardian. The opportunity for crime occurs in the moment when the offender faces the target while guardians are absent. The second concept, the rational choice perspective, is based on the idea that the offender considers benefit and risk stemming from the crime. The third concept is the crime pattern theory that focuses on the importance of time and space. This master thesis focuses on the usability of the opportunity theory for crime in the context of our current society. Although the opportunity theory for crime is nearly forty years old, this work shows that it is also applicable on cybercrime since some of the "classical" crimes moved from physical space to cyberspace. The potential offender and suitable target exist and behave similarly in cyberspace and in physical space. The difference between the two worlds is notable for the capable guardian, who does not occur randomly in the cyberspace but is embodied in the form of ever-present protection. The opportunity theory also claims that the opportunities are highly specific, they play role in causing all crime, they are influenced by technological...