Designing the Curriculum for a Minor in Cyber Criminology

We are living in an age of growing cyber crime and the costs associated with it. With more and more people and devices being connected through the Internet, there are plenty of opportunities for new kinds of criminal activity as the Internet provides cyber criminals with anonymity and global reach. According to the FBI, in 2018 the Internet Crime Compliant Center (IC3) [1] received 351,936 complaints with total losses exceeding $2.7 billion. The threat of cyber crime is real and pertinent when the Internet is intertwined with our everyday lives. We must prepare today’s undergraduate students, tomorrow’s future workforce, to fight this growing threat of cyber crime. If we do not prepare today, we will be vulnerable tomorrow. This paper details our experiences in developing and implementing an interdisciplinary minor in Cyber Criminology. The minor is designed for students who are interested in learning about cyber crime from the dual perspectives of computer science and criminal justice.