When Cybercrimes Strike Undergraduates

Cybercrimes can cause various kinds of harm to those affected. This paper focuses on how cybercrimes impact undergraduate students, a group particularly vulnerable to cybercrimes due to their extensive use of technology and their recently gained financial responsibility and social independence. We present a mixed methods study to understand students' knowledge, perceptions, and behaviors regarding cybercrimes. 10 semi-structured interviews provided the groundwork for a theoretical model, which was subsequently tested on a sample of 222 survey responses. We found that roughly half of the undergraduate students in our studies have experienced one or more cybercrimes while in college, with malware, hacking, and phishing being the most prominently experienced cybercrimes. Furthermore, we found that students acquire their knowledge of cybercrimes predominantly through people they personally know who have been victimized by a cybercrime and the media. Our model shows how students' knowledge of cybercrimes and their self-control in using the Internet influences their perceived cybercrime self-efficacy and their fear of cybercrimes. Self-efficacy and fear, in turn, influence their tendency to take preventative measures to avoid enabling behaviors and to report cybercrimes to the appropriate entities. We also find that despite the reported importance of adequate cybercrime reporting and access to comprehensive cybercrime statistics, the majority of students do not know how to officially report a cybercrime.