darkweb

Η ραγδαία εξέλιξη των τεχνολογικών μέσων και η καθιέρωση του διαδικτύου ως απαραίτητο και χρήσιμο εργαλείο, κυρίως στις Δυτικές κοινωνίες, προκάλεσε αδιαμφισβήτητα μια μετατόπιση του εγκλήματος, από τον φυσικό «υπαρκτό» κόσμο, στον ψηφιακό κόσμο του διαδικτύου. Η διασυνδεδεμένη φύση της τεχνολογίας και των μέσων αυτής, συνέβαλε έμμεσα στην μεταμόρφωση ορισμένων παραδοσιακών εγκλημάτων καθώς και στην γέννηση νέων εκφάνσεων, γνωστά ως εγκλήματα Κυβερνοχώρου. Το φαινόμενο της σεξουαλικής κακοποίησης ανηλίκων στο διαδίκτυο, ως μια έκφανση των εγκλημάτων αυτών αποτελεί μια προβληματική η οποία σκανδαλίζει την ηθική και την τάξη των Κοινωνιών εδώ και πάρα πολλά χρόνια. Μέσω της τεχνολογικής ανάπτυξη στο πέρας του χρόνου αντί να εκλείπει τουναντίοναπόκτησε μια νέα μορφή κατάλληλα διαμορφωμένη ενόψει του ψηφιακού κόσμου.

Within the last decade, there have been a proliferation of crypto (virtual)currencies and increasing consumer confidence accompanied by more acceptability by a growing number of merchants. This means cryptocurrencies are shifting from niche legal tenders to the mainstream financial sector.
However, virtual currencies are largely unregulated as most governments have not yet developed regulations to govern them. Also, there is the issue of cryptos becoming potential safe havens for cybercriminals, organized criminal syndicates, and terrorists who want to remain under the radar of the governments. The main feature which attracts these rogue actors is anonymity – the ability to conduct financial transactions without being detected.
Traditional banking institutions collect a lot of personal information – names, addresses, guarantors, occupations, purpose, relationships, dates of birth, identification numbers, which are
valuable when tracking down a criminal group or tracing payments made to terrorist organizations.
Thousands of cybercriminals have been identified, arrested, or publicly shames thanks to the tracing of banking information. Unfortunately, virtual currencies eliminate these requirements, thereby providing a blanket of cover for overt criminals on the open Internet and covert actors on the dark web. This problem is exacerbated by the fact there is a significant increase in the number of digital payments as opposed to paper transactions the world over. Many people are becoming more comfortable with the digital economy – online buying, selling, and payments.
On the other hand, cryptocurrencies pose multiple issues. Sanctions imposed against adversarial nations (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela) could be circumvented using cryptos; criminals
are increasingly opting for cryptos, and there is volatility in the valuation of cryptos. Thus, how does a government regulate these unstable tenders?
The research will be designated in the below format outlining the focus of each chapter. As an overview, there will be an introduction to the topic areas, then followed by the Methodology of how the research will be conducted, followed by Qualitative/Quantitative Analysis with real-world examples, ending with a Research Findings/Conclusion chapter.
The thesis will focus on both academic theory and applicable analysis for a better understanding of how Cryptocurrencies could take center stage in world finance in the future if so, these virtual currencies need to be regulated in a manner that protects the National Security of nations. On the other hand, if the research finds out Cryptos are impossible to regulate and will remain the bread-and-butter of criminal syndicates, then appropriate recommendations will be made after this study. The goal is to keep the study academically honest, void of biases, or any external influences. Where these may exist, the author will highlight the extent to which the results
might be affected.
The relevance of this project depends on the reader’s point of interest, whether for further
research, as a government official, an investment or financial expert, a Nation Security expert, and for curious readers. The thesis is focused almost entirely on the Homeland Security and National
Security implications of Cryptocurrencies are not necessarily the Blockchain technology that forms
the basis of virtual currencies. This should give clear guidelines for the audience on the peculiarities of this research.

Keywords: Research Format, Research Focus, Research Relevance, Research Audience, Cryptocurrencies, Virtual Currencies, Rogue Actors, Adversaries, Regulation

The dark web and the proliferation of criminals who have exploited its cryptographic protocols to commit crimes anonymously has created major challenges for law enforcement around the world. Traditional policing techniques have required amendment and new techniques have been developed to break the dark web’s use of encryption. As with all new technology, the law has been slow to catch up and police have historically needed to use legislation which was not designed with the available technology in mind. This paper discusses the tools and techniques police use to investigate and prosecute criminals operating on the dark web in the UK and the legal framework in which they are deployed. There are two specific areas which are examined in depth: the use of covert policing and hacking tools, known in the UK as equipment interference. The operation of these investigatory methods within the context of dark web investigations has not previously been considered in UK literature, although this ...

Il saggio affronta il tema della responsabilità penale dell’Internet Service Provider, approfondendo il ruolo dei social media nel contrasto ai reati commessi nella rete. Dopo avere dato conto delle caratteristiche essenziali del Web 2.0, l’Autrice analizza i più recenti orientamenti della giurisprudenza italiana relativi alla responsabilità dell’amministratore del blog, per passare poi a considerare i contenuti della Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, entrata in vigore in Germania il 1° ottobre 2017, e i progetti di legge in discussione in questo paese, che mirano a sanzionare i gestori delle piattaforme attive nel dark web. L’indagine evidenzia il progressivo superamento del modello di disciplina delineato dalla Direttiva 2000/31/CE e suggerisce alcune riflessioni conclusive intorno alla necessità di adeguare la normativa vigente all’attuale realtà economico-sociale.

Recently, there is an interest in studying cyber crime from a hacker-centric perspective, whose insight is to locate key-hackers and use them to find credible threat intelligence. However, the great majority of users present in hacking environments seem to be unskilled or have fleeting interests, making the identification of key-hackers a complex problem. Moreover, as ground truth information is rare in this context, there is a lack of a method to validate the results. Thus, previous work neglected this validation step or had it done manually-by hiring qualified security specialists. In this work, we address the key-hacker identification problem including a systematic method based on reputation to validate the results. Particularly, we study how three different approaches-content, social network and seniority-based analysis-perform individually and combined to identify key-hackers on darkweb forums, aiming to confirm the following two hypotheses: 1) a hybridization of these approaches tends to produce better results when compared to the individual ones; 2) a model conceived to identify key-hackers in one forum can be generalized to other forums that lack a user reputation system or have a deficient one. We conduct our experiments using a carefully selected set of features, showing how an optimization metaheuristic obtains better performance when compared to machine learning algorithms that attempt to identify key-hackers.

In recent years, there is a notable rise for proactive, intelligence-driven cyber defense mechanisms. Following this demand, we study here how to leverage the spread of adoption behavior among individuals to predict their posts on hacking forums of the darkweb, driven by the influential activities of their peers. We formulate our problem as a sequential rule mining task, where the goal is to discover user posting rules through sequences of user posts, to later use those rules to make predictions in a near future. We run our experiments using multiple post time granularities and time-windows for obtaining rules, observing precision results up to 0.78 and precision gains up to 837%, when compared to the prior probabilities of hackers posts. Our approach is an additional step in the fight against cyber-attacks.

The paper dwells on China's online underground economy using a three-dimensional approach: examining the value chains, empirical and statistical analyses. These present a vivid picture of shadow players, their actions, recruitment process, targets, conversion of stolen digital currencies and limited government efforts to counter these actors. Expands on emerging cybercrime trends, overall damages caused and future threats.

Many people involved in malicious cyber activity rely on online environments to improve their hacking skills and capabilities, among which, darkweb marketplaces are one of the most prevalent. Vendors advertise and sell their wares worldwide on those markets, generating communities of like-minded individuals focused on sub fields of hacking. As there is no direct communication between vendors in these environments, identifying the communities formed by them becomes challenging ; especially with the absence of ground truth knowledge to validate the results. In this paper, we develop a method based on Machine Learning and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to identify and validate communities of malware and exploit vendors, using product offerings in 20 different marketplaces on the darkweb. To validate the viability of our approach, we cross-validate the community assignments of common individuals selling their products on two mutually exclusive sets of marketplaces, demonstrating how the multiplexity of social ties can be used to detect and validate communities of malware and exploit vendors.