NESTA Crime Online - University of Brighton Repository

Dynamic Capabilities
The second component relates to capabilities. A firm’s capability is “a collection of
routines that confers upon an organisation’s management the ability to produce
significant outputs of a particular type”. However, analysts argue that dynamic
capabilities – the capacity to adapt to rapidly changing environments – are required to
create and sustain competitive advantage in a changing business environment. Such
capabilities therefore underpin the ability of an organisation to make best use of new
equipment or technologies to produce novel and innovative products or services. They
improve their productivity and competitive advantage. As with firms that deploy home-
grown capabilities to create competitive advantage or a market niche, cybercriminals
appear to also have some in-house capabilities to carry out their activities and easy
access to buy in the required capabilities. In part, this may be due to a complete
absence of norms and legislation and the eclectic mix of actors and their characteristics
that exist within the cybercrime world.
Business Models
The third component of the cybercriminals’ world is that of business models. The position
of firms and its activities in the value chain is an important determinant of how it
approaches business and generates a profit. Common to all definitions of business
models is an emphasis upon how a firm makes money. Business models have the added
attraction of being potentially comparable across industries. Therefore, in the context of
this study, business models refer to the way in which different cybercriminals specifically
generate revenue, and the nature of the arrangement they have with their customers
and suppliers in the value chain.
Future Trends in Cybercrime
The organisational and technological capabilities of cybercriminals, especially in the
absence of a global counter-strategy, will likely deepen and widen into the foreseeable
future. As cyberspace develops further, so new opportunities will open up for organised
crime groups.
Crimes such as electronic theft and fraud will occur more rapidly, reducing the likelihood
of being caught in the act. Information about how to compromise a system will be
available more quickly and to more people, which means that opportunistic criminals
linked into networks of organised criminals will come to dominate and define the world of
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