Russia, Ukraine and China harbor the greatest cybercriminal threat, according to the first World Cybercrime Index (WCI).
This world-first cybercrime ranking is the result of work by an international team of academic researchers who surveyed 92 leading cybercrime experts and analyzed the results following a scientific methodology.
The research project for the World Cybercrime Index took four years to complete.
The scientific paper backing the Index, titled Mapping the Global Geography of Cybercrime with the World Cybercrime Index, was in the PLOS ONE journal published on April 10, 2024.
Five Types of Cybercrime
The survey asked the 92 experts to consider five types of financially driven cybercrime, name the countries they consider each of these types of cybercrime to originate from and then rank them according to the impact, professionalism, and technical skill of its cybercriminals.
The five categories of cybercrime are:
- Technical products/services (e.g. malware coding, botnet access, access to compromised systems, tool production)
- Attacks and extortion (e.g. DDoS attacks, ransomware)
- Data/identity theft (e.g. hacking, phishing, account compromises, credit card comprises)
- Scams (e.g. advance fee fraud, business email compromise, online auction fraud)
- Cashing out/money laundering (e.g. credit card fraud, money mules, illicit virtual currency platforms)
The researchers attributed a score to every nominated country in each category and then calculated an overall score, called the WCI score, that was used to make the general ranking. A description of the calculations used can be found in the scientific paper.
Top 20 Countries with the Highest Cybercrime Threat Levels
Russia comes as the country where most cybercrime originates, with a WCI score of 58.39, followed by Ukraine (36.44) and China (27.84).
The US (25.01) and Nigeria (21.28) also make the top five. The UK, India, North Korea and Brazil all make the top ten.
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