Cybersecurity, ‘hacker’, ‘phishing’, ‘eCrime’, cybercrime or ‘dark web’ are terms

gradually becoming more and more familiar to everyone. Cybercrime is growing

exponentially, operates in many different ways and affects everybody, from citizens to

states to SMEs and large companies. Given the relevance of cybercrime, UCAM

Degrees in Criminology and Computer Engineering, together with the Guardia

Civil, have organised the Cybersecurity Day, to review the key aspects of this field and

analyse the latest trends.

Attending the opening ceremony were Pablo Blesa, UCAM Vice-Rector of

International Relations and Communication; Jesús Arribas, Chief Colonel of the 5th

Zone of the Guardia Civil; José María Caballero, Vice-Dean of the Degree in

Criminology; and Miguel Ángel Guillén, Academic Secretary of the Degree in

Computer Engineering. Blesa highlighted how important it is to hold this event at the

university since ‘we must all be aware of the risk of cyber-attacks in which they can

steal valuable information from us, but there are also states sponsoring attacks on

institutions and interests with destabilising consequences for other countries’.

The Guardia Civil's chief colonel, Jesús Arribas, insisted on the importance of online

crime: ‘The increase in this type of crime in the Region of Murcia is in line with the

national rate. We can say that 15% of crime and offences are committed online’.

One of the reasons for the exponential growth of cybercrime, according to José María

Caballero, is the fact that it is ‘a particularly favourable terrain for evading

responsibility, as there are computer tools that make it increasingly difficult to identify

who is behind this type of behaviour’.

Education, key in the fight against hackers

‘We prevent more attacks by educating society than by fighting cybercrime directly’.

Juan Salom, Chief Colonel of the Guardia Civil's Cybersecurity Coordination Unit,

gave a talk on the ‘Ecosystem of cybercrime’, in which he stressed that this type of

crime ‘generates more profits than other crimes, such as drug trafficking, and is

also a very diverse type of crime. The paedophile has nothing to do with the hacker who

swindles, nor the one who spies on his partner's mobile phone with the one who hijacks

a company's data. Each of them acts in a different way’.

To avoid some of the most frequent attacks, Luis Hidalgo, head of Institutional

Relations at the Spanish National Institute of Cybersecurity (INCIBE), offered some

basic recommendations, reminding us that the most common type of attack is ‘being

asked for personal data to receive offers or gifts that will never arrive, sexual extortion

and ‘smishing’, which is offering data on a company to receive non-existent economic

aid’. To avoid this type of attacks, and similar ones, he recommended not to trust offers

that may seem suspicious, or from people or institutions that we have not clearly

identified, before we give our data.