Nationally recognized scholar to present on cybercrime, hacking and stolen data markets

March 6, 2013

The Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology sponsored a nationally recognized scholar on cybercrime, hacking, and stolen data markets to give a presentation to faculty, students, and surrounding agencies. On March 6th, Dr. Thomas Holt, Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, gave a presentation entitled, “The Social Structure of the Market for Stolen Data.” Dr. Holt presented his study that examined publicly accessible Russian and English language web forums where individuals buy and sell financial information. These findings shed light on the complexity of and division of labor between participants, any coordination of roles within and across markets, and the general associations between buyers, sellers, and forum operators in stolen data markets.

Thomas J. Holt is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on hackers, malware, piracy, and various forms of cybercrime over the last decade, including over 35 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Crime and Delinquency, Deviant Behavior, the Journal of Criminal Justice, the International Journal of Cyber Criminology, and Social Science Computer Review. Dr. Holt also served as a co-editor of the book Corporate Hacking and Technology-Driven Crime with coeditor Bernadette Schell (2011), is the editor of Crime On-Line: Correlates, Causes and Context (2010) which is now appearing in its 2^nd edition in 2013, and is a co-author of Digital Crime and Digital Terror, 2^nd edition (2010). He is also a regular presenter at academic and professional conferences, including local hacker conferences across the United States.