NESTA Crime Online - University of Brighton Repository

assumptions about the various types of business model and their features but have
failed to demonstrate how much cybercrime falls into each category. However, with the
fast adoption of the Internet, online business models have proliferated in recent years.
Our interviews have largely supported this view, and made an important call to improve
both the general understanding and the necessary technical knowledge to prosecute
Internet-based business models – since current efforts seem to be placed in traditional
offline and hybrid methods.
3 Conclusions and recommendations
3.1 The future trends for cybercrime
Involvement in cybercrime is likely to continue on the path of low risk and high
gain. New business models and new entrants encouraged by low barriers to
entry are already emerging.
The organisational and technological capabilities of cybercriminals, particularly with no
global counter-strategy, will likely go deeper and wider into the foreseeable future. As
cyberspace develops further, new opportunities will open up.
It remains to be seen how the current global financial crisis will affect this situation. If it
is deep and prolonged, this may hit the emerging and educated middle classes in
developing countries harder than most and encourage a new generation of under- or
unemployed youth with IT skills to seek entry into the profitable and comparatively low
risk world of cybercrime. The BRIC countries have already seen the start of such a
growth. Countries in South East Asia, the Middle East and Central and Southern Europe
cannot be too far behind the further extensive diffusion of IT capabilities into Africa,
Asia, Latin America and parts of Europe.
As more countries gain substantial economic power, global solutions to global problems
will become more difficult to attain – genuine, broad based consensus will replace the
viewpoint of a single superpower. In the absence of effective global governance and
leadership, loose networks will proliferate to pursue convergent goals and interests.
This can also be seen within the cybercrime ecosystem and, moreover, the ecosystem
perspective permits a clearer view of multipolarity within the cybercrime universe, with
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