Internet and network technologies have evolved dramatically in the last two decades, with rising users' demands to preserve their identities and privacy. Researchers have developed approaches to achieve users' demands, where the biggest part of the internet has formed, the Deep Web. However, as the Deep Web provides the resort for many benign users who desire to preserve their privacy, it also became the perfect floor for hosting illicit activities, which generated the Dark Web. This leads to the necessity of finding automated solutions to support law and security agencies in collecting information from the Dark Web to disclose such activities. In this paper, we illustrate the concepts needed for the development of a crawler that collects information from a dark website. We start from discussing the three layers of the Internet, the characteristics of the hidden and private networks, and the technical features of Tor network. We also addressed the challenges facing the dark web crawler. Finally, we presented our experimental system that fetches data from a dark market. This approach helps in putting a single dark website under investigation, and can be a seed for future research and development.
From proactive detection of cyberattacks to the identification of key actors, analyzing contents of the Dark Web plays a significant role in deterring cybercrimes and understanding criminal minds. Researching in the Dark Web proved to be an essential step in fighting cybercrime, whether with a standalone investigation of the Dark Web solely or an integrated one that includes contents from the Surface Web and the Deep Web. In this review, we probe recent studies in the field of analyzing Dark Web content for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), introducing a comprehensive analysis of their techniques, methods, tools, approaches, and results, and discussing their possible limitations. In this review, we demonstrate the significance of studying the contents of different platforms on the Dark Web, leading new researchers through state-of-the-art methodologies. Furthermore, we discuss the technical challenges, ethical considerations, and future directions in the domain.
In the last two decades, illicit activities have dramatically increased on the Dark Web. Every year, Dark Web witnesses establishing new markets, in which administrators, vendors, and consumers aim to illegal acquisition and consumption. On the other hand, this rapid growth makes it quite difficult for law and security agencies to detect and investigate all those activities with manual analyses. In this paper, we introduce our approach of utilizing data mining techniques to produce useful patterns from a dark web market contents. We start from a brief description of the methodology on which the research stands, then we present the system modules that perform three basic missions: crawling and extracting the entire market data, data pre-processing, and data mining. The data mining methods include generating Association Rules from products' titles, and from the generated rules, we infer conceptual compositions vendors use when promoting their products. Clustering is the second mining aspect, where the system clusters vendors and products. From the generated clusters, we discuss the common characteristics among clustered objects, find the Top Vendors, and analyze products promoted by the latter, in addition to the most viewed and sold items on the market. Overall, this approach helps in placing a dark website under investigation.
In the last two decades, the Dark Web has become the perfect resort for various illicit activities. Cryptomarkets are widespread platforms in the cyberspace of the Dark Web where participants trade for illegal gaining. In this article, we present a conceptualization approach of cryptomarkets based on several recent studies on the phenomenon. We attempt to conceptualize cryptomarkets in technical and social aspects to introduce an understanding of their operating mechanisms and the robustness of their communities. We demonstrate the concept of the Satisfaction Factor that attracts individuals to cryptomarkets. Furthermore, we discuss the importance of forums to members of cryptomarkets as technical and social supportive platforms. The article also includes a comparison of cryptomarkets and conventional trading networks and discusses the efforts of law enforcement agencies and their effects in disrupting cryptomarkets. Moreover, we discuss the need for further researches.
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