From Harm to Healing: Understanding Individual Resilience after Cybercrimes

TL;DR

This study explores how individuals recover from cybercrimes, identifying recovery stages and factors influencing resilience, emphasizing trauma-informed support and collaborative strategies to enhance victim recovery.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed, trauma-informed framework of recovery stages and highlights the importance of social support, internal factors, and context in building cyber resilience.

Findings

Victims go through recognition, coping, processing, and recovery stages.

Social support and self-regulation aid emotional recovery.

Service providers influence financial recovery outcomes.

Abstract

How do individuals recover from cybercrimes? Victims experience various types of harm after cybercrimes, including monetary loss, data breaches, negative emotions, and even psychological trauma. The aspects that support their recovery process and contribute to individual cyber resilience remain underinvestigated. To address this gap, we interviewed 18 cybercrime victims from Western Europe using a trauma-informed approach. We identified four common stages following victimization: recognition, coping, processing, and recovery. Participants adopted various strategies to mitigate the impact of cybercrime and used different indicators to describe recovery. While they mostly relied on social support and self-regulation for emotional coping, service providers largely determined whether victims were able to recover their money. Internal factors, external support, and context sensitivity collectively contribute to individuals' cyber resilience. We recommend trauma-informed support for cybercrime victims. Extending our conceptualization of individual cyber resilience, we propose collaborative and context-sensitive strategies to address the harmful impacts of cybercrime.