Cyber Criminology as an Academic Discipline: History, Contribution and Impact

There are many positive uses of the Internet. However, it has become an area of Wild West. Many unscrupulous persons started using it for criminal purposes. Notably, the founding fathers of the Internet did not envisage that it will become a medium of criminality or it will create new forms of crime. Though, Internet is an international space, it is only governed by American laws (Jaishankar, 2011a). This legal lacuna further created problems, as many of the countries did not know how to manage cyber crimes in their jurisdictions. Initially, academics also could not understand cyber crime as it is a new form of crime (Jaishankar, 2007a). Especially, criminologists were very slow in researching cyber crimes (Jaishankar, 2007a), though; their counterparts in the field of computer and internet science surpassed them and created new fields such as information security and cyber forensics. This gap in the field of criminology was well addressed by me and I founded the academic discipline “Cyber Criminology” in the year, 2007. Recently, Ndubueze (2017, p, 17) and Meško (2018, p. 190) formally credited me as the Founding Father of Cyber Criminology. This editorial deals with the History, Evolution, Contribution and Impact of Cyber Criminology as an academic Discipline