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Special Issue 5 Eur. L. Enf't Rsch. Bull. 45 (2022)
The Transnational Cybercrime Extortion Landscape and the Pandemic: Changes in Ransomware Offender Tactics, Attack Scalability and the Organisation of Offending

handle is hein.journals/elerb5000 and id is 47 raw text is: David S. Wall School of Law, University of Leeds UM Abstract The sudden disruption of work, recreation and leisure practices caused by the COVID-19 lockdown caught many organisations and their employees unaware, especially during the move towards working from home. This led adaptive cybercriminals to shift their own focus towards home workers as a way into organisational networks. The upshot was a massive acceleration in major cyberattacks upon organisations and a noticeable shift in offender tactics which scale up levels of fear in victims to encourage payment of the ransom. Such tactics include a shift towards naming and shaming victims, the theft of commercially sensitive data and attacks targeting organisations which provide services to other organisations. These developments have also led to changes in the organisation of offenders online. Such attacks negatively impact upon national and international economies as they try to recover from lockdown. Drawing upon an analysis of 4000+ cases of ransomware attacks collected for the EPSRC EMPHASIS & CRITICAL research projects, this paper charts the evolution of ransomware as a modern cybercrime and also changes in the organisation of cyber-criminals as well as highlighting some of the implications for trans- national policing. Keywords: Cybercrime, Ransomware, Crime and the Pandemic, Organised Cybercrime, Policing cybercrime Introduction' The 2020 COVID-19 lockdown immediately disrupted the routine behaviour of billions of people globally by suddenly forcing them to stay indoors and, in many cases, work at home. In order to pass their time many took to their computer devices for leisure and pleasure and to communicate with others. Very often, work- ers had to use their personal computing equipment 1 This article is based upon a paper delivered at the CEPOL (European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training) Annual Research Conference, Featured Presentation 16.00, 5 May 2021. https://conference.cepol.europa.eu/cepol-online-confer- ence-2021 /talk/DBR7WE/ along with varying levels of personal security and risk awareness. These changes in routine behaviour were not lost on criminals who quickly adapted in order to defraud individuals and organisations or gain access to their networks to inflict more cybercrime. While there were no new patterns of cybercrime victimisation, oth- er than pandemic specific scams, there was, however, a visible change in cybercrime attack vectors which ac- celerated the exposure of new pandemic related vul- nerabilities and increased the overall scale and impact of cybercrime. These changes are best demonstrated by the case of ransomware, which seeks to encrypt the victim's data and de-encrypt it once a ransom payment ;CEPOL

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