Cybercrime Prevention Principles for Internet Service Providers

The report outlines a strategic framework for ISPs to mitigate cyber threats by focusing on default consumer protection, awareness raising, supply chain security, and the hardening of routing and signalling protocols. It argues that by raising the 'barrier to entry' for criminals, ISPs can shift the economics of cyberattacks, reduce operational overheads from fraud complaints, and increase trust in digital services. The document provides specific technical recommendations, such as implementing DMARC for email security and BCP38 for ingress filtering, while highlighting case studies from providers like BT, Proximus, and Korea Telecom to demonstrate the efficacy of these measures.

• ISPs are uniquely positioned to combat high-volume online crimes because they act as carriers of internet traffic, allowing them to address threats at the source before they reach consumers.
• The financial burden of botnets is primarily borne by ISPs, with research showing that approximately 85% of botnet infrastructure is hosted within consumer ISP networks.
• Implementing the first principle—protecting consumers by default—can significantly reduce the spread of botnets and the associated costs for both providers and users.
• Social engineering, particularly phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC), remains a dominant threat; the FBI estimated US losses from BEC fraud exceeded $1 billion in 2018.
• The adoption of Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is recommended to reduce email spoofing and increase the cost for attackers to conduct social engineering.
• To mitigate risks from vulnerable CPE, ISPs should restrict management protocols such as telnet, SSH, UPNP, and SNMP from being accessible from the internet by default.
• Routing and signalling vulnerabilities, such as BGP hijacking and SS7 exploits, allow criminals to reroute traffic or geolocate users; over 70% of ISPs in one survey were affected by spoofing-related attacks.
• Implementing BCP38 ingress filtering is recommended to make it more difficult for machines on a network to be used in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against others.
• The report suggests that the next phase of work must focus on public-private collaboration to create policy frameworks that incentivize ISPs to adopt secure behaviours while maintaining an open internet.

APA

World Economic Forum (2020). Cybercrime Prevention Principles for Internet Service Providers. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Cybercrime_Prevention_ISP_Principles.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Cybercrime Prevention Principles for Internet Service Providers. 2020. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Cybercrime_Prevention_ISP_Principles.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Cybercrime Prevention Principles for Internet Service Providers |date=January 2020 |url=http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Cybercrime_Prevention_ISP_Principles.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2020cybercrime, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Cybercrime Prevention Principles for Internet Service Providers}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2020}, month = jan, url = {http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Cybercrime_Prevention_ISP_Principles.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }