Cybercrime

Cybercrime encompasses a wide range of criminal activity carried out using digital devices and networks. International classification schemes, including one adopted by the United Nations, group cyber offenses into categories such as unauthorized access, damage to computer data or programs, sabotage intended to disrupt a computer system or network, unauthorized interception of data, and computer-based espionage. The scale is large and growing: in 2018 alone the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 351,937 complaints of cybercrime, accounting for losses of 2.7 billion dollars, and cybercrime victimization has since been estimated at 71 million people annually. Investigating it typically means treating a computer itself as a source of evidence, the province of digital forensics; in the United States, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are the lead federal agencies combating it.