How does cyber technology impact interactions between offenders and victims?

Before cyber technology, most interactions between offenders and victims happened in person, or at least in their physical environment. Now anyone from anywhere can attack someone through emails, phone calls, and hacking. Someone can be attacked in today’s internet age without even knowing they are actively being attacked. Sometimes it has to do with accidentally downloading a hidden file or searching the wrong url, but either way a person can be entirely vulnerable with the click of a button. Before a culprit could be identified by understanding who a victim knows and has negative interactions with, but now anyone can be a target at anytime and sometimes the effects of these attacks can uproot lives. People can loose their money, security, and privacy with the click of a button. In some cases of ransomware attackers will without important information and sell it as a ransom. Locations can be discovered through social media websites. Sometimes hackers are very good at hiding their locations and then victims never find out who attacked them, or even worse it could be some random person in another country. As technology grows more security and developments in protections with be discovered, but in the mean time educating citizens on their online practices is the safest way to prevent negative online interactions.

How should we approach the development of cyber-policy and -infrastructure given the “short arm” of predictive knowledge?

Cyber policy must always continue to change as well as infrastructure protections must continue to develop. One thing we know to be true is that our infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber-attacks based on history. Therefore, as technology grows security for infrastructure must grow as well. Cyber policy must adapt to new information and new ways of hacking. We can predict the types of attacks that may happen in the future to preemptively prepare for devastating attacks.