Personal Denial Of Service (PDOS) Attacks: A Discussion and Exploration of a New Category of Cyber Crime

Abstract

The growth of the Internet has created a corresponding growth in Internet-based crimes and online misbehavior, particularly among younger computer-savvy people who learned the technical skills necessary for such activities throughout their entire lives. We define a new category of cyber crime called a Personal Denial of Service attack (PDOS). A PDOS is a cyber crime in which an individual deliberately prevents the access of an individual or small group to online services such as email or banking. Due to the nature of a PDOS, these acts can be overlooked by law enforcement and organizations that operate Internet infrastructure such as universities. We analyze a PDOS attack in the context of the Routine Activities Theory of criminal justice. We also surveyed university students to ascertain their attitudes towards online account breaches as related to a PDOS attack. Our motivation for this work is twofold: to stress the need for cyber ethics education at the university level, and to illustrate how a previously uncategorized type of cyber crime is easily perpetrated in such an environment.