{
  "title": "Global Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018 | Volume 55 | Number 2",
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  "summary": "While the financial sector may be most at risk of cyberattack, such attacks also carry a higher risk for cybercriminals, in part because of greater attention from law enforcement. A look inside the industrialization of cybercrime.",
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "The hacker threat",
      "content": "- Cybercrime is now a mature industry operating on principles much like those of legitimate businesses in pursuit of profit.\n- Combating proliferation requires disrupting a business model that employs easy-to-use tools to generate high profits with low risk.\n- Long gone are the legendary lone-wolf hackers of the late 1980s; profit-making since the 1990s has created markets, exchanges, specialist operators, outsourcing service providers, and integrated supply chains in cybercrime.\n- Several nation-states have used the same technology to develop cyber weaponry for intelligence gathering, industrial espionage, and disrupting adversaries’ infrastructures."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Evolution",
      "content": "- Supply of highly skilled specialists has not kept pace with increasing technical sophistication; advanced tooling and automation have filled the gap.\n- 1990s: penetration testing tools were simple, often custom built, and required deep technical knowledge, limiting exploitation to a few professionals.\n- As tools improved, less skilled \"script kiddies\" began to succeed; today launching a phishing operation requires only a basic understanding, willingness, and some cash.\n- Cyber risk quantification is difficult due to scarce and unreliable loss data and rapidly evolving threats.\n- Scenario-based estimates cited:\n  - Lloyd’s of London estimates losses of $53.05 billion for a cloud service outage lasting 2½ to 3 days affecting the advanced economies.\n  - An IMF modeling exercise put the base-case average aggregated annual loss at $97 billion, with the worst-case scenario in the range of $250 billion."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Causes and consequences",
      "content": "- Motivations mirror physical-world crime: profit potentially much higher than legal business with lower perceived risk.\n- Phishing profitability is estimated in the high hundreds or even over a thousand percentage points.\n- Intellectual property theft by sophisticated actors likely yields substantial profits (speculative in the source).\n- Cybercrime poses systemic risk, especially to the financial sector:\n  - Financial market infrastructure is most vulnerable given its pivotal role and dependence on a relatively small set of technical systems.\n  - Successful disruptions to payment, clearing, or settlement systems—or theft of confidential information—could result in widespread spillovers and threaten financial stability.\n- To date, no cyberattack with systemic consequences has occurred, but recent incidents (ATM networks, online banking systems, central banks, payment systems) raise concern.\n- Sectoral differences in resilience:\n  - Financial sector: long dependence on IT, history of strong IT control environments mandated by regulation, better support for law enforcement, deeper budgets, and more developed cybersecurity culture.\n  - Health care: typically lacks resources for effective cyber defense outside the wealthiest nations; recent ransomware attacks targeted Allscripts and two regional U.S. hospitals; greater risk to life-support and clinical systems.\n  - Utilities/power/communication grids: concern about state-sponsored disruption or infiltration; example: 2007 attack against Estonia’s Internet infrastructure."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Countermeasures and policy recommendations",
      "content": "- The best way to tackle cybercrime is to attack its business model by raising the business risk through better international cooperation.\n  - Cybercrime operations spanning jurisdictions complicate takedown and prosecution; some jurisdictions are slow, ineffective, or uncooperative.\n  - Stronger cooperation would make tracking suspects and charging them faster and more effective.\n- Financial-sector-specific measures:\n  - Regulators have developed assessment standards, enforceable expectations and benchmarks, and encouraged information sharing among firms and regulators.\n  - Bank regulators conduct IT examinations that factor cybersecurity into stress testing, resolution planning, and safety and soundness supervision.\n  - Some regulators require firm-specific simulated cyberattacks drawing on government and private sector intelligence and expertise.\n  - Firms have increased investment in cybersecurity, incorporated cybersecurity into risk management, and sought to transfer some risk via cyber insurance.\n- Cross-industry and systemic measures needed:\n  - Move from a disparate, decentralized landscape to coordinated, enforced minimum cybersecurity standards across industries.\n  - Stepped-up cybersecurity awareness training to address basic technical weaknesses and user errors that cause most breaches.\n  - Improve speed of detection, effectiveness of response, and rapid restoration of operations after breaches.\n- International cooperation is essential because aggregate global risk can exceed the sum of individual risks due to global IT networks, national response structures, ineffective cooperation, or presence of nation-states among attackers.\n\nGlobal Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018 | Volume 55 | Number 2\n\n---\n\n Content in this bundle\n\n- صناعة الجريمة الإلكترونية\n  - صناعة الجريمة الإلكترونية (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - صناعة الجريمة الإلكترونية (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- La industrialización de la ciberdelincuencia\n  - La industrialización de la ciberdelincuencia (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - La industrialización de la ciberdelincuencia (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- La filière bien structurée de la cybercriminalité\n  - La filière bien structurée de la cybercriminalité (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - La filière bien structurée de la cybercriminalité (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- Global Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018\n  - Global Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018 (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - Global Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018 (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- Киберпреступность приобретает индустриальный характер– Финансы и развитие – июнь 2018 года\n  - Киберпреступность приобретает индустриальный характер– Финансы и развитие – июнь 2018 года (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - Киберпреступность приобретает индустриальный характер– Финансы и развитие – июнь 2018 года (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- 网络犯罪的产业化 - 金融与发展\n  - 网络犯罪的产业化 - 金融与发展 (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - 网络犯罪的产业化 - 金融与发展 (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n\n---\n\nSource: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2018/06/global-cybercrime-industry-and-financial-sector-gaidosch"
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    "Authors: TAMAS GAIDOSCH",
    "Published: June 1, 2018",
    "Volume: 55",
    "Cybercrime is now a mature industry operating on principles much like those of legitimate businesses in pursuit of profit.",
    "Combating proliferation requires disrupting a business model that employs easy-to-use tools to generate high profits with low risk.",
    "Long gone are the legendary lone-wolf hackers of the late 1980s; profit-making since the 1990s has created markets, exchanges, specialist operators, outsourcing service providers, and integrated supply chains in cybercrime.",
    "Several nation-states have used the same technology to develop cyber weaponry for intelligence gathering, industrial espionage, and disrupting adversaries’ infrastructures.",
    "Supply of highly skilled specialists has not kept pace with increasing technical sophistication; advanced tooling and automation have filled the gap.",
    "1990s: penetration testing tools were simple, often custom built, and required deep technical knowledge, limiting exploitation to a few professionals.",
    "As tools improved, less skilled \"script kiddies\" began to succeed; today launching a phishing operation requires only a basic understanding, willingness, and some cash.",
    "Cyber risk quantification is difficult due to scarce and unreliable loss data and rapidly evolving threats.",
    "Scenario-based estimates cited:",
    "Motivations mirror physical-world crime: profit potentially much higher than legal business with lower perceived risk.",
    "Phishing profitability is estimated in the high hundreds or even over a thousand percentage points.",
    "Intellectual property theft by sophisticated actors likely yields substantial profits (speculative in the source).",
    "Cybercrime poses systemic risk, especially to the financial sector:",
    "To date, no cyberattack with systemic consequences has occurred, but recent incidents (ATM networks, online banking systems, central banks, payment systems) raise concern.",
    "Sectoral differences in resilience:",
    "The best way to tackle cybercrime is to attack its business model by raising the business risk through better international cooperation.",
    "Financial-sector-specific measures:",
    "Cross-industry and systemic measures needed:",
    "International cooperation is essential because aggregate global risk can exceed the sum of individual risks due to global IT networks, national response structures, ineffective cooperation, or presence of nation-states among attackers.",
    "**صناعة الجريمة الإلكترونية**",
    "**La industrialización de la ciberdelincuencia**",
    "**La filière bien structurée de la cybercriminalité**",
    "**Global Cybercrime Industry Matures from Hackers to Businesses - IMF F&D Magazine - June 2018**",
    "**Киберпреступность приобретает индустриальный характер– Финансы и развитие – июнь 2018 года**",
    "**网络犯罪的产业化 - 金融与发展**"
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