Cybercrime-Funded Terrorism and the Threats Posed by Future Technologies: Appealing Economics and Targets
Abstract
The large scale Internet penetration in processes and activities, from manufacturing to end users, has reinforced the time-invariant pillars of cybercrime, namely social engineering, and software vulnerability, e.g., respectively, ransomware and bugs in banking software. Both these pillars spin off two dichotomous results: the goal is an economic profit for the author or confidential information steal/damage of the target of the attack (e.g. to critical infrastructures). Moreover, enabling technologies for anonymity facilitate the progressive shift of criminal markets on the Internet, as TOR marketplaces and cryptocurrencies show, raising the costs of successful investigation. These phenomena can be carried out by isolated criminals, by serious organized criminals or, mostly, from organized crime benefitting from the Crime as a Service (CaaS) model. Hence only apparently cybercrimes, e.g. digital frauds, are not connected to serious criminal organizations, in particular, terrorism, using these activities to fund the core mission. Cybercrime attractiveness, in terms of expected revenues per action, drives the choice of the organized crime, impacting on its willingness to pay in the CaaS model. This paper, firstly, will explore the economic value of cybercrime, overviewing the revenues from different online crimes in the past, highlighting the most attractive, then will overview the potential targets of terrorism enabled by the adoption of new technologies.