# Creating Honeypots to Prevent Online Child Exploitation
## 1 Introduction  
The ubiquity of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to be an integral part of our daily lives has resulted in digital crime becoming commonplace. This wave of technological change has enabled not only new forms of crime to be committed, but for existing crime to move to the digital world. These offences present a dramatically different context to traditional place-based crimes, requiring new approaches in combating the risks being faced. Cybercrime, as it can be termed, includes both crimes directed at ICT systems (such as computers and networks), and where the ICT system itself is a key part in the commission of the crime [1]. The cost of cybercrime is often calculated based on revenue loss as a result of business disruption, information and productivity loss, and equipment damage as a result of a cyber-attack. These cyber-attacks take multiple forms, including denial of service attacks, hacking and with an increased impact in recent years, from malicious code such as ransomware. These attacks are of a technical nature, and there is a broad set of challenges faced by law enforcement in responding to such attacks which commonly cross jurisdictional boundaries [2]. Other crimes, enabled by cyber systems, do not have a dollar value, as their motivation is psychosocial or geopolitical in nature. Psychosocial cybercrimes include cyber stalking and bullying, and the dissemination of Child Exploitation Material (CEM) [3]. These crimes are people-centric, and cause harms which are psychological in nature, resulting in long-lasting effects for the victims. Geopolitical include cyber based hate speech and vandalism. As laws increase in volume and complexity to adapt to the changing nature of digital crimes, the need for strategies to educate the public about the parameters of legal rulesbecomes more apparent [4]. Relatedly, crime-prevention literature has underscored that the likelihood of criminal decision-making can be reduced by providing potential offenders with information at the point of crime commission [5]. This includes information about the risk of detection by law enforcement agencies and the harms associated with the particular behaviour [5]. By way of example, road signs serve to inform the public of the legal speed for a section of road, enabling users to choose to travel within the limit. The speed limit not only protects the driver, but also other road users and those in the vicinity. When examining digital crimes and their context, these mechanisms are not as easy to apply. We lack a mechanism that is the context equivalent for a speed sign beside the road. Many traditional approaches within the cyber security field for responding to threats (which could escalate to a cybercrime) are technical, due to the threats themselves being technical in nature [6; 7; 8; 9]. Common preventative measures are barriers and system hardening methods, which aim to prevent a future attack from being successful and mitigate the impact of when it does occur. However, these approaches are less effective in addressing people-centric crimes such as the distribution of CEM, in which the initial abuse may occur offline, but the harms caused are perpetuated further online when content featuring the original abuse is circulated. In this context, we are commonly only left with reactive tools such as requesting that content is removed or that a particular user be banned from a platform. Few programs exist [10] which seek to proactively deter potential offenders from engaging in prohibited online behaviour by educating users and raising their awareness about the risk and harm involved in the behaviour. This paper describes research that has been undertaken to address the current research vacuum in this area. It presents an infrastructure that provides an opportunity to educate Internet users who may be at risk of deciding to commit a cybercrime.