The Cynicism of Modern Cybercrime: Automating the Analysis of Surface Web Marketplaces
This work addresses the challenge of monitoring cybercrime for law enforcement and cybersecurity researchers, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new data source (surface web marketplaces).
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing illegal activities on surface web marketplaces by performing a longitudinal analysis using automated web scraping and machine learning, identifying hundreds of merchant profiles and detailing traded products, prices, and currencies.
Cybercrime is continuously growing in numbers and becoming more sophisticated. Currently, there are various monetisation and money laundering methods, creating a huge, underground economy worldwide. A clear indicator of these activities is online marketplaces which allow cybercriminals to trade their stolen assets and services. While traditionally these marketplaces are available through the dark web, several of them have emerged in the surface web. In this work, we perform a longitudinal analysis of a surface web marketplace. The information was collected through targeted web scrapping that allowed us to identify hundreds of merchants' profiles for the most widely used surface web marketplaces. In this regard, we discuss the products traded in these markets, their prices, their availability, and the exchange currency. This analysis is performed in an automated way through a machine learning-based pipeline, allowing us to quickly and accurately extract the needed information. The outcomes of our analysis evince that illegal practices are leveraged in surface marketplaces and that there are not effective mechanisms towards their takedown at the time of writing.