“The past five years have seen an increasing industrialisation of the cyber criminal marketplace.”
That’s the view of Scott McVicar, Managing Director, Cyber Security, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, who believes the fragmentation of cyber criminal activities will pose new challenges to detection and investigation across the industry in 2015.
Based on his work this year in the fields of cyber security and financial crime, McVicar believes the following will be the top five predictions for the digital criminality landscape in 2015.
Fragmentation of cyber criminal activities
McVicar believes the past five years have seen an “increasing industrialisation” of the cyber criminal marketplace with specialisms such as malware authoring, counter-AV testing, exploit kits, spamming, hosting, money-muling, and card cloning becoming miniature markets of their own.
“Crime as a service is a reality, lowering the barrier to entry for budding criminals and fuelling the growing threat, year after year,” McVicar adds.
“Law enforcement action has done well to date by focusing on the big problem sets and causing significant disruption to these activities.”
In 2015, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence anticipates these efforts will cause a fragmentation in the market as criminal actors split into smaller units using newly developed and more resilient capabilities.
“We believe this will present a greater challenge for the security community,” McVicar adds. “We also see the need for law enforcement to find ways to drive efficiency and automation into their intelligence collection and analysis work streams.
“This should enable them to ramp up the number of simultaneous investigations and make disruption a ‘business as usual’ activity.”
We will enter a period of ‘hyper regulation’
In the context of millions of dollars in fines, McVicar says financial institutions now have an imperative to actively search out criminals such as money launderers, rather than simply being compliant with regulatory guidance.
“We believe more organisations will hire more big hitters from the law enforcement and national security world to show they are serious about stopping the criminals,” he adds.
