Monthly Archives: November 2025

A decade of data sharing: Celebrating the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre’s 10-year anniversary

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. What began as an ambitious plan to collect and share cybercrime data with academic researchers has grown into a global network of scholars working to understand and reduce crime and other harms.

Image by Atlantic Ambience

When Professors Ross Anderson and Richard Clayton founded the Centre back in 2015, they established an ethos of benefiting our academic colleagues and undertaking good research. This pioneering vision has continued to be a key driver of our work.

In the past 10 years, the Centre has shared datasets with almost 500 academics across over 100 universities. Computer scientists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, economists, and psychologists use our datasets to tackle critical questions about cybercrime, fraud, abuse, and online safety.

To mark this occasion, incoming PhD student Hannah Pankow undertook a comprehensive 10-year review of our work, interviewing and surveying our licensees and analysing the papers that use our datasets. If you would like to learn more about this review, the report is now available.

Cybercrime does not stand still, and neither do we. We are continuing to expand data collection to new platforms and forms of harm, to ensure that it continues to reflect the ever-changing realities. We are seeking long-term funding for infrastructure maintenance to ensure its critical data collection and analysis tools remain available to the international research community for another decade.

None of this progress would be possible without our hard-working, creative and dedicated team. I also thank our funders, past and present, including the EPSRC, ESRC, European Research Council, donations received from ThreatSTOP, Google and Meta, and gifts in kind from Digital Ocean and Solarflare Communications.