Security News > 2022 > June > World Economic Forum wants a global map of online crime

An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.

Instead of only looking at highly technical indicators of compromise, the researchers are also relying on publicly available sources of information: social media accounts, which can reveal who in the criminal world is "Friends" with whom, as well as public information including indictments and other court documents as well as published blogs and analysis of various crime rings.

"One of the problems we frequently bump up against when we're talking about sharing information is: Is it proprietary from the private sector? Is it a work product such that they don't necessarily want to share? Is it classified information from governments? But that doesn't mean there isn't information that's available," said Amy Hogan-Burney, associate counsel and GM of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit.

An online search can reveal "a tremendous amount" of information, Hogan-Burney continued, noting that once this "Entire mountain" of data is unearthed, "You need to figure out what from that is useful? And then how can we use it in an appropriate way?".

After choosing which miscreants to study, the group will collect all of the publicly available information on each that they can dig up.

Of course, crime ring infrastructure disruption is one of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit's favorite pastimes.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/06/10/atlas_wef_rsa/