Report Now. Report Effectively. Conceptualizing the Industry Practice for Cybercrime Reporting

Reporting plays a vital role in combatting cyber-crimes. The data collected from cybercrime reporting can not only bolster the efforts of those on the responding end of such attacks (i.e., government, law enforcement agencies, and the technology industry), but also provide relevant prevention tips to computer users to help mitigate their cybercrime risk. Despite the importance of cybercrime reporting, we observe that many cybercrimes go unreported, which arguably can be due to an overall lack of effectiveness of currently existing cybercrime reporting mechanisms. This study aims to streamline cybercrime reporting processes at PayPal by proposing a design of an interactive customer-facing cybercrime reporting interface. The overall goals of the proposed design are to (1) appropriately triage reports both within the company and to relevant external entities and (2) to educate the customer base about cybercrimes and cybercrime reporting through helpful links. The proposed design was tested with 523 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and was considered user-friendly and informative by our participants. Moreover, a statistical model demonstrated that aside from our proposed interface's usability, users' victimization, self-efficacy, and perception of cybercrimes' severity all had a positive effect on the likelihood to report a cybercrime. Our proposed design and evaluation have the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of cybercrime reporting to corporations and government/law enforcement agencies.