Cyber Resilient Citizens

We help professionals and supervisors with tailor-made interventions to make vulnerable target groups more resilient to online crime.

Effective solutions for vulnerable groups

Together with our partners, we develop innovative and evidence-based solutions that support vulnerable groups in the complex digitalising society. We focus on preventing victimisation as a result of online scams, cyberbullying, unwanted sharing of sexual images, recruitment by criminal organisations and criminal exploitation. We also evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in these areas.

Our research

Our research contributes to strengthening the cyber resilience of vulnerable groups in society. Examples of projects in the Cyber Resilient Citizens research line include:

• Digital Participation: making people at De Klup in Almelo with a mild learning disability (MID) resilient to online crime.
• Risk Factory: evaluation of the current information programme at the Risk Factory in Enschede for second year students in secondary education, and research into expanding the programme with an intervention aimed at preventing them from becoming money mules.
• Cyberbullying: developing a joint method for different actors (parents, teachers, youth work, municipality, police, victim support, etc.) for tackling cyberbullying, and developing an intervention to strengthen the moral awareness of children aged 10-16 regarding cyberbullying.
• Impact evaluation of the City Deal Local Resilience Cybercrime: evaluation of various interventions to make children between 8 and 12 more resilient to online crime.
• PhD research on money mules: a PhD research by Luuk Bekkers on understanding and combatting money mules among young people in collaboration with Leiden University, NSCR, The Hague University of Applied Sciences and VU University Amsterdam.