Abstract
A senior police officer recently described to me a serious dilemma that he had just faced. The officer had received reliable intelligence that a serious financial crime had been committed by an East European Mafia group using a computer located within his police force area. Early one morning, anticipating stiff resistance, he sent an armed unit to the house containing the computer. After breaking down the door, his officers were shocked to find a sleepy breakfasting family, rather than the violent mafia gang they had expected to meet. On this occasion, the police had chosen the wrong course of action, because the family’s computer had been infected by malicious software and used remotely by fraudsters as part of a botnet (robot network).
For the uninitiated, the title of this chapter is a pun on David Frankel’s film The Devil Wears Prada (2006). For those too young to remember, a Lada is the colloquial term for a car based on a box-like Fiat 124 design that was manufactured by the Russian Lada Car Company in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter develops the discussion found in the first section of Wall (2011[2008]).
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© 2012 David S. Wall
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Wall, D.S. (2012). The Devil Drives a Lada: The Social Construction of Hackers as Cybercriminals. In: Gregoriou, C. (eds) Constructing Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392083_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392083_2
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