Spotlight on cybercrime

With digital devices in almost every pocket and on every desk, and digital infrastructure running every organization, cybercrime has become a major threat worldwide.  INTERPOL Spotlight looks at how criminals use malicious software, phishing, sextortion or online scams to defraud individuals, compromise businesses and critical infrastructure, and threaten economies – while maximizing their profits.

As agile and innovative as the digital ecosystem it thrives in, cybercrime is constantly creating new challenges for law enforcement, and INTERPOL member countries around the world cite it as one of the top threats facing them today. International criminal networks increasingly function anonymously, behind the dark web, utilising cryptocurrencies or encrypted messaging platforms, while the rise of cybercrime-as-a-service is lowering the entry barrier to crimes that offer high potential gains.

Functioning much like the multitude of digital services available in the legal economy, these turnkey toolkits – for online extortion, business email compromise, ransomware and more – are easy-to-use, inexpensive and readily available to those who know where to look. “The simpler it gets, the more criminals move into cybercrime, leading to more attacks, more often,” says Sangsoon Kim, Assistant Director, INTERPOL Cyber Threat Intelligence. “Easy access to crime-as-a-service has accelerated the blurring of the boundaries between traditional and digital crimes as transnational criminal networks see opportunities to leverage cyber tools and take their illegal activities to a new level of efficiency or move into more crime areas.”

INTERPOL is taking active steps to:

• Track the cyberthreats.  The latest global intelligence paints a clear picture of a cybercrime landscape dominated by similar criminal modus operandi in most regions: ransomware and other types of malware, data breaches – including targeting critical infrastructure – and online scams, with the latter increasingly driven by artificial intelligence to make phishing attacks or sextortion even more difficult to evade.
• Target operations and future preparations through global cybercrime operations led by INTERPOL in collaboration with member countries and its private partners.
• Develop a project around cyber attack response. Project Symphony, will help protect critical infrastructures and major international events from cyber attacks through capacity building and enhanced coordination between law enforcement, cybersecurity authorities and national Computer Emergency Response Teams.

EAST focusses on tackling cybercrime through the EAST Expert Group on Payment and Transaction Fraud (EPTF) which is focussed on social engineering and fraudulent transactions, and the EAST Expert Group on All Terminal Attacks (EGAF), which is focussed on card and terminal related fraud.