Despite large-scale breaches and cyberattacks dominating the news headlines, the Cisco Talos intelligence group cautions that we aren’t ready to deal with the snowballing small-time cybercrime trend. 

“The cybersecurity industry tends to focus on extremely large-scale or sophisticated, state-sponsored attacks,” Nick Biasini, head of outreach at Cisco Talos, wrote in a blog post. However, “The average person is far more likely to have their identity stolen or fall victim to some other sort of scam than be directly affected by a large-scale breach — and business is booming.”

He warns there is an accelerated trend in the U.S. and globally that street gangs are pivoting from drugs to fraud fueled by cybercrime. “It's a lot less likely to draw immediate law enforcement response and there typically aren't turf wars in cyberspace.”

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 847,376 complaints last year, with on average a little more than $8,000 lost per victim, Biasini noted. 

“The fact that it is typically a smaller monetary crime makes it easier to accomplish,” he wrote. “The larger the denomination and the larger the scale, the more likely you are to draw the interest of federal law enforcement, who have far deeper pockets and much more sophisticated capabilities when it comes to prosecuting cybercrime.”

On the flip side, the trend brings more challenges to law enforcement, especially at the local level, and they need to evolve along with the criminals, Biasini pointed out.

Now is the time to start building capabilities into police departments for handling the small-time cybercrime that is poised to explode, he suggests. 

As the security industry is facing a talent shortage in general, police departments can recruit within their work force and look to youth in their community to build a talent pipeline.

“There are ample investigators inside police departments, look for those with skills in online-based investigations and leverage them for cybercrime in the future,” Biasini wrote. And “building relationships with existing computer science programs or high schools in the area to identify this talent could be a great resource.”