About

The Northern Cloud Crime Centre joins an interdisciplinary group of researchers together to work towards investigating criminal activity in the cloud. “The Cloud” introduces some entirely new complications to the identification, and policing, of crime on the internet, especially with regard to investigating and enforcing regulation.

It is primarily a new force multiplier which dramatically extends the reach of criminals globally and technologically; far beyond that which the internet currently facilitates. For the uninitiated, cloud technologies essentially share computing processing facilities on demand and while the potential of ‘cloud’ is still evolving for the purposes of this discussion, ‘The Cloud’ is the extra cyberspace that cloud technologies create; a space that creates much good and also much evil.

The Centre is led by Newcastle University, UK, and includes consortium members from Durham University, Northumbria University, and Leeds University. The consortium members engage on a wide range of research initiatives to understand and conceptualize cloud crime, to identify and detect typical crime patterns with machine learning techniques and to support law enforcement in the protection and prevention from it.

The members of the Centre self-identify as data or social scientists, bringing a range of specializations and expertise areas to bear on the problem space of cloud crime and cyber crime in the wider sense.

Members of the Centre engage in projects with external partners to solve specific research problems on cloud crime on real datasets.