Product Offerings in Malicious Hacker Markets
This study addresses the growing prominence of malicious hacker markets on the darkweb and deepweb, providing initial insights for cybersecurity professionals, but it is incremental as it focuses on data collection and basic analysis without major breakthroughs.
The researchers tackled the problem of understanding product categories and specialization in malicious hacker markets by scraping 17 sites and analyzing the data using manual labeling and unsupervised clustering, resulting in insights into various categories of malicious hacking products.
Marketplaces specializing in malicious hacking products - including malware and exploits - have recently become more prominent on the darkweb and deepweb. We scrape 17 such sites and collect information about such products in a unified database schema. Using a combination of manual labeling and unsupervised clustering, we examine a corpus of products in order to understand their various categories and how they become specialized with respect to vendor and marketplace. This initial study presents how we effectively employed unsupervised techniques to this data as well as the types of insights we gained on various categories of malicious hacking products.