Russia, Ukraine, China and the USA top the global list of cybercrimes

Russia tops the list of countries considered the top sources of cybercrime, followed by Ukraine, China, the United States and Romania, according to the inaugural Global Cybercrime Index, released Wednesday.

This index, which identifies global cybercrime hotspots, is the result of three years of intensive research by an international team of researchers classifying the most important sources of this type of crime at the national level.

The index, published this Thursday in PLOS ONE magazine, shows that few countries harbor the biggest cybercrime threats, with Russia topping the list. The UK ranks eighth.

Miranda Bruce of the University of Oxford and co-author of the study says the research will allow the public and private sectors to focus their resources on the main centers of cybercrime and spend less time and money on cybercrime countermeasures in countries where the problem is not that important.

“The research behind the index will help lift the veil of anonymity that surrounds cybercriminals and we hope it will help combat the growing threat of commercial cybercrime,” said Miranda Bruce.

The researcher and co-author said that the continuous collection of this data will allow us to monitor the emergence of new critical access points and intervene early in countries at risk before a serious cybercrime problem arises.

The data underlying the index was collected through a survey of 92 crime experts from around the world who collect information on cybercrime.

The survey asked experts to review the five main categories of cybercrime, identify the countries they consider to be the main sources of each of these types of crime, and rank countries by the influence, professionalism and technical competence of their cybercriminals.

Another co-author of the study, Professor Jonathan Lusthaus from the Department of Sociology and the School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford, explained that cybercrime has largely become an invisible phenomenon because criminals often hide their location. fake profiles and technical protection.

“Given the illegal and anonymous nature of this activity, it is not easy to access or reliably investigate cybercriminals. They are actively hiding. When we try to use technical data to determine their location, we end up failing because their attacks ricochet onto the Internet infrastructure. The best way to find out where these people actually are is to ask those whose job it is to track them,” Lusthaus said.

“We hope to expand this research so that we can determine whether national characteristics such as educational level, Internet penetration, GDP or level of corruption are associated with cybercrime,” he said, emphasizing that although many people think cybercrime is global and changeable character. , this research “supports the idea that, as with other forms of organized crime, it is rooted in specific contexts.”