ITU Cybercrime Legislation Resources:
ITU Publication on UNDERSTANDING CYBERCRIME: Phenomena, Challenges and Legal Response

The adoption by all countries of appropriate legislation against the misuse of ICTs for criminal or other purposes, including activities intended to affect the integrity of national critical information infrastructures, is central to achieving global cybersecurity. Since threats can originate anywhere around the globe, the challenges are inherently international in scope and require international cooperation, investigative assistance, and common substantive and procedural provisions. It is thus important that countries harmonize their legal frameworks to combat cybercrime and facilitate international cooperation.

The ITU Understanding Cybercrime Guide aims to help developing countries better understand the national and international implications of growing cyber-threats, assess the requirements of existing national regional and international instruments, and assist countries in establishing a sound legal foundation. The Guide provides a comprehensive overview of the most relevant topics linked to the legal aspects of cybercrime. In its approach, the Guide focuses on the demands of developing countries. Due to the transnational dimension of cybercrime, the legal instruments are the same for developing and developed countries. However, the references used were selected for the benefit of developing countries. The Guide provides a broad selection of resources for a more in depth study of the different topics. Whenever possible, publicly available sources were used, including many free-of-charge editions of online law journals.

As such, the ITU publication Understanding Cybercrime: A Guide for Developing Countries addresses the first of the seven strategic goals of the ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), which is the elaboration of strategies for the development of legislation that is globally applicable and interoperable with existing national and regional legislative measures.

The UNDERSTANDING CYBERCRIME: Phenomena, Challenges and Legal Response was prepared for ITU by Dr. Marco Gercke.

The Guide contains six main chapters. After an Introduction (Chapter 1), the Guide provides an overview of the phenomena of cybercrime (Chapter 2). This includes descriptions of how crimes are committed and explanations of the most widespread cybercrime offences such as hacking, identity theft and denial-of-service attacks. The Guide also provides an overview of the challenges as they relate to the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime (Chapters 3 and 4). After a summary of some of the activities undertaken by international and regional organizations in the fight against cybercrime (Chapter 5), the Guide continues with an analysis of different legal approaches with regard to substantive criminal law, procedural law, international cooperation and the responsibility of Internet Service Providers (Chapter 6), including examples of international approaches as well as good-practice examples from national solutions. aims to provide countries with sample legislative language and reference material that can assist in the establishment of harmonized cybercrime laws and procedural rules.

The purpose of the ITU publication Understanding Cybercrime: A Guide for Developing Countries is to assist countries in understanding the legal aspects of cybersecurity and to help harmonize legal frameworks. As such, the Guide aims to help developing countries better understand the national and international implications of growing cyber-threats, assess the requirements of existing national regional and international instruments, and assist countries in establishing a sound legal foundation.

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