Cybercrime has become one of the most pressing societal challenges of our time. Criminal actors adopt emerging technologies faster than most institutions can respond, and they operate across borders and jurisdictions.

The tricky part is that what looks like many separate crimes can actually be part of the same network. If you investigate each case on its own, you may keep chasing individual incidents without seeing the bigger picture. The challenge is to find the connections between cases — and, ultimately, the key nodes that link many of them together. That’s where you can potentially have a much bigger impact.

However, no single discipline sees the full picture. Cybercrime spans technical infrastructure, economic incentives, and human behavior. Countering it therefore requires an interdisciplinary approach and a joint effort between law enforcement, industry, and academia. It also requires us to think globally, because criminal networks are not stopped by national borders.