How shared intelligence protects against and disrupts online exploitation and cybercrime

Cybercrime continues to be one of the most pervasive global challenges, and disrupting it will require collaboration between the public and private sectors.

That principle sits at the core of the World Economic Forum’s Partnership against Cybercrime, and of the Cybercrime Atlas it helped create – a community of cybercrime experts, hosted at the Forum, that uses open-source research to map criminal networks and identify joint public and private sector responses. A recent operation coordinated by INTERPOL offers a clear illustration of that model in practice.

In June 2026, INTERPOL announced the results of Operation CyberProtect III, a joint effort targeting an emerging form of online exploitation: the misuse of subscription-based content platforms to facilitate human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

Co-organized by INTERPOL and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and held from 19 to 22 May 2026, the operation brought officers from seven countries together with a coalition of partners, including the Cybercrime Atlas.

Organized crime networks are increasingly exploiting online content platforms to recruit and exploit women, minors and vulnerable adults, often luring victims with the promise of legitimate work before drawing them into harmful situations.

Earlier in 2026, INTERPOL issued a Purple Notice to alert member countries to this method, which typically involves criminal groups posing as legitimate modelling agencies and then exerting control over victims’ accounts and earnings.

Two features make this threat especially difficult to counter. The paywalled design of subscription platforms, combined with coded language, helps offenders evade detection, while differences in laws and jurisdictions across borders slow law enforcement responses. These are precisely the conditions – transnational operations exploiting gaps between national systems – that the Cybercrime Atlas was built to address.

The Cybercrime Atlas brings a distinctive capability to operations like CyberProtect III. Its community of vetted experts, which is drawn from cybersecurity firms, financial institutions, academia and non-profits, works from open-source intelligence to map the actors, infrastructure and money flows behind criminal networks.

Because that research starts from openly available information, it can be shared across borders and organizations without the data-sharing and privacy obstacles that often slow collaboration, and it lets a diverse group of specialists build a fuller picture of criminal activity than any single organization could alone.

“Cybercrime can no longer be treated as a series of isolated technical incidents. It is an economic system with supply chains, service providers, affiliates, recruiters, money movers and physical infrastructure,” says Derek Manky, Chief Security Strategist and Global Vice-President, Threat Intelligence, Fortinet.

“Disrupting it requires a shared understanding of how these networks operate, supported by coordinated action across cybersecurity, law enforcement, government, financial institutions, civil society and the private sector.”

The trafficking threat sits squarely within work the Cybercrime Atlas had already prioritized.

In mid-2025, the Cybercrime Atlas began a formal collaboration with the anti-trafficking non-profit STOP THE TRAFFIK and its Traffik Analysis Hub, specifically to support research into cyber-scam operations that rely on human trafficking and exploitation for their workforce – its first formalized partnership with an organization outside its core community.

That focus on the intersection of cybercrime and human exploitation is exactly what made the Cybercrime Atlas a relevant contributor when officers gathered to investigate exploitation on content subscription platforms.

The contribution also reflects a track record. Last year, the Cybercrime Atlas was named an operational partner in INTERPOL’s Operations Serengeti and Serengeti 2.0, a cross-border cybercrime crackdown involving authorities from 18 African countries and the United Kingdom that led to more than a thousand arrests and the seizure of some $140 million in suspected criminal assets.

The same model – community-vetted, actionable research handed to those positioned to act – underpins its role in CyberProtect III.

During Operation CyberProtect III, 14 officers from participating countries worked side by side to detect warning signs across websites, social media, messaging apps and subscription platforms.

In law enforcement, a ‘hackathon’ describes a focused event where participants collaborate to solve a specific policing challenge using digital tools. In just four days, the team generated dozens of leads, including the identification of:

The operation also surfaced broader trends shaping this threat: criminal groups marketing online “coaching” to scale their activities, the use of cryptocurrencies to move funds and the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate fake profiles – the kind of infrastructure and enablers that Cybercrime Atlas research is designed to map and trace back to disruption opportunities.

Operation CyberProtect III reflects a lesson that runs through the World Economic Forum’s cybercrime work: the public sector holds the operational and disruption capabilities, but much of the relevant knowledge and technical expertise sits in the private sector and civil society.

The Cybercrime Atlas exists to connect the two by turning fragmented expertise into shared, actionable intelligence that increases the difficulty, cost and risk of running such criminal enterprises.

That logic of shifting from reactive response towards coordinated, ecosystem-wide action also sits at the heart of the Partnership Against Cybercrime’s recent white paper, Fighting Cyber-Enabled Fraud: A Systemic Defence Approach, which calls for prevention, protection and mitigation measures delivered jointly across law enforcement, industry and civil society.

Operation CyberProtect III is a concrete example of that systemic approach in motion, as outlined by Steven Masada, Global Head of Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit. “Operation CyberProtect III highlights the power of collaboration in combating emerging forms of online exploitation,” he says.

“By bringing together law enforcement, industry and civil society partners through initiatives like Cybercrime Atlas, we can generate actionable intelligence, identify victims, and disrupt criminal networks that prey on vulnerable people.”

As criminals adopt new platforms, payment methods and technologies, defenders must adapt alongside them.

Operations like CyberProtect III show what becomes possible when the Cybercrime Atlas’s research is placed in the hands of law enforcement: victims are identified, investigative leads are created, and criminal networks face greater friction.

As the Cybercrime Atlas continues to grow its community and diversify its research, the task now is to sustain and scale these collaborations, so that protecting vulnerable people online becomes the norm rather than the exception.