The excerpt below is from an article written by William Dixon for the World Economic Forum, which appeared on June 20, 2019. The original article in its entirety can be read here.
In little over a decade, cybercrime has moved from being a specialist and niche-crime type to one of the most significant strategic risks facing the world today, according to the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2019. Nearly every technologically advanced state and emerging economy in the world has made it a priority to mitigate the impact of financially motivated cybercrime.
The global experience of the past decade has largely been dominated by the emergence of a professional underground economy that provides scale, significant return-on-investment and entry points for criminals to turn a technical specialist crime into a global volume crime. The cybersecurity landscape in the past decade has been shaped by the targeting of financial institutions, notably with malware configured to harvest payment information and target financial platforms. The early cybercrime market that gave rise to the criminal online ecosystem was centred on the trading of harvested stolen credit cards, and some of the most high-profile and sophisticated global attacks focus on the penetration and manipulation of the internal networks of complex global payment systems.
The Russian-speaking world has not been immune from these trends. Cyberattacks on financial organizations in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe by some of the most sophisticated cybercrime gangs in the world have targeted clients, digital channels and networks. The Russian-speaking underground economy is one of the most active globally, with hundreds of fora and tens of thousands of users. Criminal groups exploit the margins of co-operation to conduct global campaigns, and their threat capacity is always adapting as groups work together in a borderless environment to combat technical defences.
Read the original article in its entirety here.
