Organised crime encompasses a broad range of activities and people, from peasants in Colombia to transnational corporate actors. Due to the diversity of actors, a global analysis of organised crime does not allow us to understand its different workings. Moreover, some activities are still poorly documented. In order to fill these gaps, Federico Varese, a professor of sociology at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics and specialist of mafias, proposes a new framework that distinguishes three key activities of organised crime groups: production, trade and governance.
Based on extensive data collection, he wants to find out whether or not those functions overlap and shed light on how groups specialised in one function differ from those with other specialisations. This is the ambition of the CRIMGOV project (2021–2026) for which he has received support from the European Research Council highly selective Advanced Grants programme.

Cybercrimeology, a Canadian podcast about cyber crime, its research, and its researchers, sits down with Dr. Miranda Bruce, to discuss research mapping the global landscape of cybercrime and the importance of understanding local factors that contribute to digital offenses. She discusses the challenges of measuring cybercrime, the innovative use of expert surveys, and the development of the World Cybercrime Index.

The American Society of Criminology has selected Federico Varese, Professor of sociology at the CEE, as the 2024 recipient of the Thorsten Sellin, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to the field of criminology”.

The World Cybercrime Index (WCI), released in 2024, identifies the world’s key cybercrime hotspots. It measures the significance of the cybercrime produced in different countries, and then ranks these countries according to their “cybercriminality”: the impact of the cybercrimes produced there, and the skills of the cybercriminals who commit these crimes. The WCI is the first index to use expert survey data to map cybercrime geography.

The Index was developed as a joint partnership between the University of Oxford and UNSW Canberra, and was partly funded by the CRIMGOV Project and ERC Advanced Grant based at the University of Oxford and Sciences Po. It was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Co-authors include Dr Miranda Bruce from the University of Oxford and UNSW Canberra, Associate Professor Jonathan Lusthaus from the University of Oxford’s Department of Sociology and Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, Professor Federico Varese from Sciences Po in France, Professor Ridhi Kashyap from the University of Oxford, and Professor Nigel Phair from Monash University.

To develop it, the co-authors of the study conducted a survey with 92 of the world’s top experts in cybercrime intelligence and investigations in 2021. These experts nominated up to five countries they believed were the most significant sources of five different cybercrime types – Technical products/services, Attacks and extortion, Scams, Data/identity theft, and Cashing out/money laundering. Experts then rated each country they nominated according to the impact of their cybercrimes, and the technical and professional skills of the cybercriminals who operate there. The co-authors then used this data to generate the World Cybercrime Index.

The WCI has been featured in more than 200 news items across the world, including national newspaper and magazine outlets, ABC News Radio in Australia, and "Somewhere on Earth: the Global Tech Podcast" in the UK.

Russia leads the list of countries that host cybercrime, followed by Ukraine, China, the USA, Nigeria and Romania, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. The findings come from anonymous questionnaires completed by ninety-two cybercrime experts. The researchers say this survey approach overcomes a major challenge in investigating cybercrime - the anonymity of perpetrators who conceal their identities online. Dr Miranda Bruce, from the University of Oxford and New South Wales is lead author and is on show.

A newly developed World Cybercrime Index shows that most cybercrime threats originate in a few countries, and highlights specialisations according to the type of threat. These results, published in the journal PLOS ONE on 10 April 2024, were obtained as part of the ERC CRIMGOV project led by Federico Varese.
Cyber attacks, online scams, etc.: the cost of cybercrime around the world is growing, not only financially but also in terms of corporate reputation and people's privacy. Until now, the dominant approach to cyber security has been technological, aimed at raising the level of protection of digital infrastructures and detecting intrusions into networks. However, it is difficult to know where cybercriminals are operating from, because of the strategies they use to mask their location. Yet, locating the perpetrators of cybercrime would enable us to understand the social and economic context in which these people live and to explore long-term social solutions for combating this type of crime.

Cyber is officially out of the shadows. Attacks attributed to a commissioning country is the new trend. Add 25% for fingerprints and FaceID.

When Australia felt the repeated jolts of ransomware attacks against Optus, Medibank Private and Latitude, there was an immediate and visceral political desire for swift and immediate retribution against the perpetrators — who were already well-known in cybersecurity circles.
More than a year later it came, via sanctions and the public naming and shaming of key protagonists such as Aleksandr Ermakov, after the Australian Signals Directorate did its due diligence and possibly knocked a few boxes, not that that would ever be confirmed or denied.

International researchers have discovered more cyber crime hotspots than first expected in a world first cyber crime index.
Russia topped the list of 97 nations which took into account cyber criminals technical proficiency, professionalism and impact of their crimes.

Following three years of intensive research, an international team of researchers have compiled the first ever ‘World Cybercrime Index’, which identifies the globe’s key cybercrime hotspots by ranking the most significant sources of cybercrime at a national level.

An international team of researchers have compiled the first ever World Cybercrime Index, which identifies the United States as one of the globe's most significant sources of cybercrime.

The World Cybercrime Index, compiled by scientists at the University of New South Wales Canberra in Australia and the University of Oxford in the U.K., shows that a relatively small number of countries house the greatest cybercriminal threat.

Russia tops the list, followed by Ukraine, China, the United States, Nigeria, and Romania.