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Course

Cybercrime, Security and Digital Law Enforcement - LAWS8030

Faculty: Faculty of Law

School: Faculty of Law

Course Outline: See below

Campus: Sydney

Career: Postgraduate

Units of Credit: 6

EFTSL: 0.12500 (more info)

Indicative Contact Hours per Week: 2

Enrolment Requirements:

Prerequisite: Academic Program must be either 9200 or 9210 or 9220 or 5740 or 5750 or 9285 or 5285 or 9214 or 5214.

Excluded: CRIM2023, JURD7566, LAWS3066

CSS Contribution Charge: 3 (more info)

Tuition Fee: See Tuition Fee Schedule

Further Information: See Class Timetable

View course information for previous years.

Description

‘Cybercrime’ examines how the online world has borne new crimes and law enforcement responses, as well as investigates how the computer has become both a target of attack and a tool for criminal activity. ‘Cybercrime’ explores a number of emerging cybercrimes (cyber-stalking, hacking, and attacks to critical infrastructure), and also explores how old crimes are affected in new mediums (organised crime, electronic theft, pornography, child abuse materials, and peer-to-peer filesharing systems). How do nation-states regulate criminal activity of those persons and organizations located abroad? How is law enforcement shifting from traditional mechanisms to new regulatory regimes and technological solutions? Additional topics include cyber-terrorism, hactivism, information warfare, and digital forensics. A technical background is not essential.


LLM Specialisations

Recommended Prior Knowledge

None

Course Objectives

A candidate who has successfully completed this course should be able to:
  • Articulate the main elements of various cybercrime offences
  • Understand the unique challenges posed to law enforcement agents, policy makers and prosecutors
  • Appreciate the level of technical complexity and evolving issues in high tech crime
  • To be able to engage in debate on policy reform in the area
  • Explain and provide better instruction to a digital forensic specialist
  • Completion of an independent research essay of peer-review quality

Main Topics

  • Introduction: The nature of cybercrime
  • National and international legal and policy frameworks
  • The technologies behind cybercrime (domain name system, web-poisoning, web hi-jacking, fast-flux, rock phish, dynamic ip addresses, spam, botnets, irc, p2p, encrypted channels)
  • Electronic theft and corporate espionage
  • Malware, viruses, hacking
  • Cyber-stalking
  • Child pornography and child abuse materials
  • Criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights (Copyright and illicit p2p fileswapping)
  • Security, cyber-terrorism, and attacks to critical infrastructure
  • Digital forensics issues
  • Hands-on forensics examination (In computer lab)

Assessment

Notes and Queries (2 X 10% - one page critical analysis of course readings)

Peer Review of Another Student’s Essay (20%)

Independent Research Essay ( 60%) 6000 words
UNSW Library

Study Levels

Undergraduate Study Postgraudate Study Postgraduate Research Study Non-Award Study

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