A cybercrime network is a linked set of people, services, and infrastructure used to commit online fraud, theft, or account abuse. It often includes separate roles for recruiting victims, running phishing sites, moving stolen data, laundering money, and selling access or credentials. That division of labor makes the operation more resilient, because one part can be replaced if another is exposed.
This term matters in cyber security because attacks are rarely isolated technical events. A single phishing email may lead to credential theft, then unauthorized logins, then payment fraud or data exfiltration. Defenders look for the whole chain: suspicious domains, reused accounts, unusual transactions, and shared infrastructure across campaigns. Law enforcement and security teams disrupt cybercrime networks by linking logs, identities, payments, and servers across jurisdictions, which can reveal the wider structure behind an incident.