THE BAD THINGS THAT HUMANS DO WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
“British businesses are not following “freely available” advice to thwart hackers, GCHQ's cyber security chief has said.”
— from UK businesses 'ignore free advice' to stop cyber attacks, GCHQ warns as M&S still reels... - LBC as of 25 May 2025
As seen online:
“Around two months since the DORA regulation came into force, analysis of 250 businesses in nine financially regulated sub-sectors, looking at factors included FCA fines and complaints, ICO complaints and the number of cybersecurity incidents reported, and the number of firms registered to Cyber Essentials Plus, research has found a “severe gap in cybersecurity resilience.””
— from Financial Services Companies Most at Risk of DORA Non-Compliance | SC Media UK as of 24 May 2025
As seen online:
“Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe.”
— from Stark Industries Solutions: An Iron Hammer in the Cloud – Krebs on Security as of 24 May 2025
Cyberbadness is a handy word for "all the bad things that are done with, to, or by computers."
The world needs the word cyberdbadness because other words fall short. For example, a lot of cyberbadness is cybercrime, but not all the of the ways in which digital technology is misused and abused are crimes at all times or in all places.
The term "cyberbadness" was coined by the network security expert Cameron Camp.
Used narrowly, cyberbadness can be defined as: "the misuse and abuse of digital technology for selfish and/or malicious ends." This ranges from malicious code that damages systems or steals information from them, all the way through email scams and online fraud to disinformation campaigns on social media. A broader use of cyberbadness encompasses the negative impact of computer systems on the environment, economics, and social justice.
The need for words to describe dirty deeds done with computers is documented with considerable humour by the pioneering researcher: Don Parker. During the first half of the 1970s he tracked reports of such deeds, but because his employer at the time would not let him use the term computer crime, he settled on computer abuse. See footnote 64 of the law journal article Advancing Accurate and Objective Cybercrime Metrics by Stephen Cobb which references a book worth borrowing: Crime by Computer by Don B. Parker (1976).