Publications

This annual assessment of the cybercrime threat landscape highlights the persistence and tenacity of a number of key threats. In all areas, we see how most of the main threats have been reported previously, albeit with variations in terms of volumes, targets and level of sophistication. This is not for lack of action on the side of the public and the private sector. Rather, this persistence demonstrates the complexity of countering cybercrime and the perspective that criminals only innovate when existing modi operandi have become unsuccessful. Therefore, while much focus in contemporary parlance is on the potential impact of future technological developments on cybercrime, such as Artificial Intelligence, we must approach cybercrime in a holistic sense. Countering cybercrime is as much about its present forms as it is about future projections*. New threats do not only arise from new technologies but, as is often demonstrated, come from known vulnerabilities in existing technologies.