Following three years of intensive research, an international team of researchers have compiled the first ever World Cybercrime Index, which identifies the globe’s key cybercrime hotspots by ranking the most significant sources of cybercrime at a national level.
The index, published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows that a relatively small number of countries house the greatest cybercriminal threat. Russia tops the list, followed by Ukraine, China, the United States, Nigeria, Romania, North Korea, Great Britain, Brazil and India. Latvia comes in at number 20.
The data that underpins the Index was gathered through a survey of 92 leading cybercrime experts from around the world who are involved in cybercrime intelligence gathering and investigations. The survey asked the experts to consider five major categories of cybercrime, nominate the countries that they consider to be the most significant sources of each of these types of cybercrime, and then rank each country according to the impact, professionalism, and technical skill of its cybercriminals.
The five major categories of cybercrime assessed by the study were technical products/services (e.g. malware coding, botnet access, access to compromised systems, tool production), attacks and extortion (e.g. denial-of-service attacks, ransomware), data/identity theft (e.g. hacking, phishing, account compromises, credit card comprises), scams (e.g. advance fee fraud, business email compromise, online auction fraud), and cashing out/money laundering (e.g. credit card fraud, money mules, illicit virtual currency platforms).
Source: BNS
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