Cybercriminal groups have spent the past several years building something most defenders haven’t: a genuinely collaborative ecosystem.

They share infrastructure, sell each other access, and trade tooling across what used to be separate criminal specialties, so a phishing kit developer, a credential broker, and a fraud operation can all profit from the same compromised account without ever formally working together.

Economic volatility is likely to give that criminal ecosystem even more room to grow. Crime patterns have long shifted with economic conditions, and as the cost and expertise required to participate in online crime continue to fall, periods of instability could produce sharper spikes in phishing, scams, and fraud.

Defenders, meanwhile, have gone the opposite direction.…