UMD Researchers Team Up to Study Cybercrime Victimization over Smartphone Devices

As advancing technology allows people to email, shop and even pay bills directly from their smartphones, are users setting themselves up to be easy targets for cybercrime attacks?

Researchers from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering at the University of Maryland are teaming up to try and answer this question and determine which factors make smartphone users most vulnerable to cybercrime. The research team was recently awarded a $500,000, two-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support its scientific activity on this project. 

“In the past, the bad guys focused on targeting computer users because desktop and laptop computers were so prevalent. Nowadays, everybody has a smartphone and so it seems the bad guys have found a new playground for their malicious activities,” said David Maimon, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice, and one of the project’s Principal Investigators.

According to Maimon, people open themselves up to cyberattacks through their phones in four distinct ways: by visiting suspicious websites; downloading applications that contain malicious software; opening email attachments and clicking on links sent through text messages from unknown senders; and utilizing unsecure, public Wi-Fi networks to access personal information, such as a bank account.

Maimon discusses the research more in-depth in the video below:

To give the researchers better insight into common smartphone behaviors, research scientist Lucas Layman and his team from the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering at UMD developed an application that collects data from smartphone users who volunteer to participate in a study. The application will allow researchers to tell when, where and how often these smartphone users talk, text, email, listen to music, surf the internet and more. It will also provide information on what types of wireless networks users are accessing, how secure those connections are, and where they are being made.

“This research is an exciting fusion of social science and computer science research. We are unobtrusively collecting behavioral data from a large number of participants using cutting edge smartphone technologies and data mining techniques, all while preserving the users’ privacy,” Layman said.

Researchers hope to recruit approximately 200 participants for the study. After Dr. Layman’s team collects the smartphone data, Dr. Maimon will pair the information with questionnaires completed by participants about their personal characteristics, as well as records from the U.S. Census Bureau and neighborhood maps provided by Google Street View. 

“Appending all this information together will allow us to pinpoint some of the environmental and individual factors that determine a person’s susceptibility to cybercrime over a smartphone,” Maimon said. “By doing this type of research, we hope to find ways to educate smartphone users with respect to the security-related issues that are out there as well as guide smartphone developers’ efforts to develop more secure devices in the first place.”

Published on Fri, Sep 23, 2016 - 10:32AM