Cybercrime as a Service: A Scoping Review

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 31 Mar 2026] Cybercrime as a Service: A Scoping Review Ema Mauko, Shane D Johnson, Enrico Mariconti Cloud computing has drastically altered the ways in which it is possible to deliver information technologies in a service-led structure, however, this has also been reflected in the cybercrime domain. Cybercrime as a Service is an economic model where a technically skilled actor offers a given cyberattack as an end-to-end service to non-technical actors who pay a subscription fee for said service. The services, which can vary in scope, targets, and delivery modes, include everything from the vulnerability discoveries, delivery of the attack, and the attack itself to financial rewards to the subscriber. In this scoping literature review, we analysed 195 articles from both academic and grey literature with a view of investigating the services articles studied, the methodological approach the how the CaaS model is predicted to develop in the future. Our review indicates that with further commercialisation of the model will further lower the barrier of entry to the cybercrime realm, increase sophistication of the attacks and increase resilience of the service providers and their ecosystem which will result in harder shutdowns of services by the authorities. Furthermore, as the model becomes more accessible, groups such as organised crime groups, extremist actors may use them as well, which may have implications for criminal activity in both cyber and physical domains. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) Cite as: arXiv:2604.00063 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.00063v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.00063 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ema Mauko [view email] [v1] Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:26:11 UTC (1,639 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.ET References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)