As highlighted in the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, cybersecurity is accelerating in response to escalating threats, geopolitical fragmentation and a widening technological divide.

With global cybercrime damages projected to exceed trillions annually and ransomware, fraud and illicit digital services becoming increasingly industrialized, the need for coordinated disruption has never been greater.

Yet, in a landscape where cyber defenders often operate in isolation, the Cybercrime Atlas offers a platform that connects experts and organizations, amplifying the impact of their individual efforts and enabling a more coordinated, systematic disruption of cybercriminal activities.

Cybercrime has evolved into a vast and complex ecosystem, comprised of diverse players that trade, collaborate, specialize and depend on each other across every phase of criminal operations.

The groups are large, globally distributed and supported by complex technical and money-laundering infrastructure. Yet, knowledge about how they operate remains fragmented, often siloed within individual organizations or countries, leaving defenders without a complete picture.

At the same time, responses are scattered. Cybercrime is transnational but law enforcement and industry efforts are often constrained by borders and limited coordination. The ecosystem gives scale and improves returns for criminals, enabling the meteoric rise of cybercrime.

The Cybercrime Atlas, an initiative hosted by the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity, helps bridge these gaps by building a shared understanding of cybercriminal networks and enabling more coordinated action.

It has launched Cosmos, an open-source map of the cybercrime ecosystem. The tool is available on the Cybercrime Atlas website and was developed by the Cybercrime Atlas community, led by Orange Cyberdefense, with contributions from Universitat de Girona, Scitum and TrendAI.

Defenders, legislators, prosecutors and investigators can use this shared “map” to develop a unified view of the ecosystem and its constituent parts; to plan, communicate and collaborate effectively; and ultimately to prevail in the struggle against cybercrime.

The complexity of cybercrimes has led to numerous frameworks aimed at breaking them down into understandable events and many useful models already exist.

Researchers and practitioners use typologies, taxonomies, ontologies, crime scripts and cyber kill chains to understand different parts of the problem.

But these approaches rarely provide a single, integrated view of both criminal processes and the wider ecosystem that enables them. In parallel, the vast, diverse structures of the cybercrime ecosystem have been analyzed using social network analysis or with a variety of machine learning approaches.

However, there is no single framework that allows the individual cybercrime processes to be comprehensively understood within the broader, networked cybercrime ecosystem in a manner that is both integrated and practically usable.

Disruption of cybercrime on a large scale involves collaboration between multiple organizations, yet they often use different terms to describe the same concepts, making communication difficult.

A unified response to cyber threats depends on shared definitions. Cybercrime taxonomies and ontologies create a common language, making it easier for organizations to communicate, identify and classify threats quickly and consistently. They also streamline incident reporting by ensuring everyone describes cyber events consistently.

Data normalization builds on this by bringing information from different systems into a consistent format. Since threat data comes from many sources and in many forms, normalization makes it comparable and usable, enabling more effective analysis, sharing and coordinated action.

Despite significant advances in understanding individual threats and attack methods, there remains a critical gap: a shared, practical way to understand how these elements fit together as a system. Without this, efforts to combat cybercrime risk remaining fragmented and reactive.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/05/mapping-cybercrime-how-a-shared-ecosystem-view-can-help-disrupt-digital-crime/