Preventing Crime-as-a-Service with Cutting-Edge Tools and Intelligence
Call ID
HORIZON-CL3-2023-FCT-01
Duration
01.09.2024 – 31.08.2027
Total Budget
Partners
Countries
Use Cases
The Vision
Crime-as-a-Service (Caas)
CaaS represents a worrying evolution in the cyber threat landscape, transforming criminal activities into organised and commercialised enterprises. Similar to legitimate Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, CaaS offers on-demand illicit services such as malware rentals and fraud platforms. This shift lowers barriers to entry for cybercriminals, enabling individuals without technical skills to engage in activities like identity theft and payment card fraud through digital means. The consequence is a significant amplification of criminal operations’ scale and impact.
Our Aim
SafeHorizon aims to tackle the emerging threat of Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS) by harnessing intelligence from various sources including the clear web, deep web, dark web, public dumps, and law enforcement datasets. By integrating these data streams with machine learning technologies, the project seeks to extract actionable evidence for legal use.
Use Cases
Monitoring transnational crime networks
Monitoring activities of actors in crime networks including ongoing malicious campaigns that may span across different jurisdictions and developing a set of dedicated crawlers which will provide insight and visibility of real-time activity of malicious online activity.
Criminal marketplace analysis
In order to assess the efficacy of the crawlers and the correlation engine, this use case is dedicated to the analysis of criminal marketplaces, and includes testing of the usefulness of SafeHorizon tools to identify crime networks and investigate their members.
Child sexual abuse and trafficking
This use case presents a comprehensive overview of the distribution channels and of the release dates of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Malware-as-a-Service
Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a business model under which cybercriminals provide access to malicious software and related infrastructure for a fee, and in this use case we monitor and analyse ongoing malicious campaigns that may target organisations or individuals.
Partners
Coordinated by the Athena Research Center, SafeHorizon is a multidisciplinary research and development initiative spearheaded by an international consortium comprising 13 partners from 11 countries. Carefully selected consortium is gathering outstanding R&D centers and universities, businesses and Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to ensure the perspective of developers, cybersecurity practitioners, researchers, and machine learning experts focusing on technical areas between security and development. Committed to contributing to cybercrime prevention improvement, the Consortium will ensure provision of a comprehensive toolbox of underdevelopment and enhanced open-source solutions for combating cybercrime designed to be user-friendly and easily adaptable.
