Samenvatting

Repeat victimization has been widely studied from the perspective of environmental criminology for several
decades. During this period, criminologists have identified a set of repeat victimization premises that are
observed for many crimes; however, it is unknown whether these premises are also valid for cybercrime. In this
study we rely on more than 9 million Zone-H data records from 2010 to 2017 to test whether these premises
apply for the cybercrime of website defacement. We show that the phenomenon of repeat victimization is also
observed in defaced cyber places (i.e. websites). In particular, we found that repeats contributed little to crime
rates, that repeats occurred even several years after the original incident, that they were committed disproportionately
by prolific offenders, and that few offenders returned to victimize previous targets. The results
suggest that some traditional premises of repeat victimization may also be valid for understanding cybercrime
events such as website defacement, implying that environmental criminology theories also constitute a useful
framework for cybercrime analysis. The implications of these results in terms of criminological theory, cybercrime
prevention, and the limitations derived from the use of Zone-H data are discussed