Chapter 3 - Crime Areas

3.1 Crime-as-a-Service - Law enforcement considerations

The dispersed nature of cybercriminals, even those in a temporary coalition for the purposes of a project or campaign, creates challenges for law enforcement (LE) intervention; there is no organised criminal group (in the traditional sense) to target and dismantle. Cybercriminals will typically only interact online and behind a wall of anonymisation, therefore targeting one individual will not always lead to identifying their associates. Associates that might be identified are likely to be distributed globally, which complicates those investigations further.

This arrangement also has advantages for law enforcement. Although targeting the cybercriminal ‘elite’ may be particularly challenging due to their operational security and/or jurisdiction, there are many secondary targets that provide skilled and essential services whose removal would cause considerable disruption to the market.

Where LE has the lawful possibility and capacity to conduct infiltration, specific identified forums used by notorious cybercriminals can be a valuable source of criminal intelligence on new and future threats as well as for obtaining evidence of current cybercrime.

It is important to remember that content hosted on a Darknet is still physically hosted somewhere and can be subject to LE intervention. The success of LE in taking down hidden services on the Darknet demonstrates how achievable this is as an operational goal: