It’s a jungle out there: Predators, prey and protection in the online wilderness

This article examines the similarity between the threats to users and organisations on the Internet and the predator-prey relationships that exist in nature. In common with their real-world counterparts, cyber-predators are seen to face selection pressures that encourage them to adapt and improve their methods, whereas their prey tend to rely upon someone else getting attacked instead of them. Observing the success of cooperative approaches in nature, a model for cooperative sharing of responsibility is proposed in order to reduce cyber-predation. Looking at major categories of cyber-predator a activities and the factors that enable them, mitigating actions are identified along with those parties that could take primary responsibility and those that they could cooperate with in order to achieve success.