Silicon den: Cybercrime is entrepreneurship

We present a fresh perspective on cybercrime: the viewpoint of entrepreneurship. We propose a framework that sets out what infrastructure enables a particular cybercrime to get started, what barriers to entry there may be, how the crime can be scaled, what factors can inhibit scaling, why defenders can be ineffective and what eventual limits there may be to growth. We flesh this out via a series of case studies and draw out a number of common factors that cause cybercrimes to succeed, to scale and to stabilise. In addition to explaining the success (and failure) of particular cybercrimes, our approach may help predict the likely success of new types of cybercrime and the changing risks posed by evolution of the types we already know.