Announced in June 2022, the Cybercrime Atlas is an initiative from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to map activities of cybercriminals and create a database that can be used by law enforcement across the world to disrupt the cyber-criminal ecosystem. Cybercrime Atlas officially launched in February 2023 in a partnership between WEF and Banco Santander, Fortinet, Microsoft, and PayPal. Cybercrime Atlas was conceptualized by WEF’s Partnership against Cybercrime, which includes more than 40 public and private organizations.
How the Cybercrime Atlas is being developed
The first iteration had “really smart” analysts from organizations throughout the globe brought together to come up with a normalized taxonomy from where samples would be selected. From this, 13 major known threat actors were the initial focus. Using open-source intelligence the analysts looked at things like the bad guy’s name, the address that they’re known to live at, their bank account details, their crypto wallet details, their social media footprint, known bulletproof hosting, and other malicious services that they’re using.