The Business and Practice of Cybersecurity

Cybercrime today operates as a sophisticated underground economy rather than a collection of isolated individuals. "Ransomware-as-a-service" arrangements let technically skilled groups lease their malware and infrastructure to affiliates in exchange for a cut of the proceeds, lowering the barrier to entry for financially motivated attacks. Stolen data, access credentials, and hacking tools are bought and sold on underground marketplaces, often settled in cryptocurrency to preserve anonymity. Estimates of the total cost of cybercrime vary widely depending on methodology, but the cybersecurity research firm Cybersecurity Ventures projected global costs exceeding eight trillion dollars in 2023, a figure that, if accurate, would rank cybercrime among the largest economies in the world.