The Cyber Threat Handbook 2020: The Organised Cybercrime

Organised cybercrime has now reached unprecedented levels on a global scale. This demanding and incredibly complex phenomenon gives rise to as many questions as it does threats.

The damage caused to the global economy by organised cybercrime has risen to unprecedented levels since 2018, valued at a total of hundreds of billions of dollars.

According to many observers, including France’s national agency for information system security (ANSSI), cybercrime will be the biggest threat we will face in the coming years. But how do we understand a phenomenon that is so diffuse, intertwined and ever-changing? How can we protect ourselves against a phenomenon that we don’t completely understand, and whose outlines are blurred, at a time when the current threat level from cybercrime poses critical strategic risks for companies and organisations?

Thales’s Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) team aims to explore this decisive question, in order to provide our partners and the general public with key insights into how organized cybercrime works.

Ransom demands now run to millions or tens of millions of euros, instead of just thousands previously, and can threaten the very survival of strategic organisations.

These ransom demands have brought sweeping change to the cybercrime threat landscape, with attackers displaying characteristics similar to major State-sponsored espionage groups while retaining their core purpose of securing financial gain.

This new report is a reflection on the nature of cybercrime, its modes of operation, the world views which inspire it, and the roles of cybersecurity actors and businesses.

The report is intended as a guide to the concepts that should be borne in mind when analysing cybercrime, and as a call for a shared reflection on the best way to create new methods of analysis. It does not take a moral stance, or engage in criticism, but seeks to identify the most effective drivers that will help people understand cybercrime, so that together we can take proactive steps to ensure everybody’s security. The report offers a new and different perspective, and seeks to propose a methodology that will help our partners and the general public to understand this extraordinarily complex phenomenon and support the development of effective response strategies.

Although this report may appear demanding on the reader or unusual in its assertions, its insights could help us all to understand certain phenomena in a completely new way.

Pierre JEANNE
VP Cybersecurity Technologies
and Solutions CTS