All your cards are belong to us: Understanding online carding forums

Haslebacher, Andreas; Onaolapo, Jeremiah; Stringhini, Gianluca

doi:10.1109/ecrime.2017.7945053

Cited by 20 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…They often use online forums for communication, where knowledge and material about various illicit and deviant topics are shared. Examples include trading in stolen accounts or credit card details [17], fraudulent monetizing techniques such as e-whoring, 1 or trading of virtual game items acquired through bots and cheats. Interest in these communities has increased in recent years and there is a wide literature on the analysis of cybercriminal forums, from different fields such as criminology, economics, cybersecurity and sociology (see Section 2.1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CrimeBB

Pastrana

Thomas

Hutchings

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '18

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Underground forums allow criminals to interact, exchange knowledge, and trade in products and services. They also provide a pathway into cybercrime, tempting the curious to join those already motivated to obtain easy money. Analysing these forums enables us to better understand the behaviours of offenders and pathways into crime. Prior research has been valuable, but limited by a reliance on datasets that are incomplete or outdated. More complete data, going back many years, allows for comprehensive research into the evolution of forums and their users. We describe CrimeBot, a crawler designed around the particular challenges of capturing data from underground forums. CrimeBot is used to update and maintain CrimeBB, a dataset of more than 48m posts made from 1m accounts in 4 different operational forums over a decade. This dataset presents a new opportunity for large-scale and longitudinal analysis using up-to-date information. We illustrate the potential by presenting a case study using CrimeBB, which analyses which activities lead new actors into engagement with cybercrime. CrimeBB is available to other academic researchers under a legal agreement, designed to prevent misuse and provide safeguards for ethical research. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Web crawling; • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy;

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CrimeBB

Pastrana

Thomas

Hutchings

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '18

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“…Products shared or traded on such forums vary greatly, from stolen personal and financial details to tutorials and vulnerability exploits (Allodi 2017;Samtani, Chinn, and Chen 2015). Research on discussion forums serving the underground economy has largely focused on stolen financial data and threat analysis (Benjamin et al 2015;Haslebacher, Onaolapo, and Stringhini 2017;Van Hardeveld, Webber, and O'Hara 2016). However, the dissemination of stolen account credentials on discussion forums has received much less attention.…”

Section: Online Dissemination On Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stolen account credentials: an empirical comparison of online dissemination on different platforms

Madarie

Ruiter

Steenbeek

et al. 2019

Journal of Crime and Justice

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Account hijacking, i.e. illegitimately accessing someone else's personal online account, is on the rise and affects not only financial accounts, but the full spectrum of online accounts. To gain more insight in the illicit act of online dissemination of stolen account credentials, we systematically examined how such credentials were offered on three different types of online platforms where stolen credentials were disseminated and how offers varied by platform. We used web scrapes of these platforms for our comparative analyses. Our results demonstrate variation by platform in the type of information on accounts and account holders offered, the average asking price for credentials, and rules and services following a transaction. We conclude with policy implications and suggestions for future research based on the criminal event perspective.

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“…Our hypothesis lies on the premise that the attention broadcast by these users towards other posts are in fact sensors for impending cyber attacks. Such studies of separating specialized users have been studied before in the context of trading financial information in carding forums [27].…”

Section: Related Work and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining user interaction patterns in the darkweb to predict enterprise cyber incidents

Sarkar

Almukaynizi

Shakarian³

et al. 2019

Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.

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With rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study, we attempt to build a framework that utilizes unconventional signals from the darkweb forums by leveraging the reply network structure of user interactions with the goal of predicting enterprise related external cyber attacks. We use both unsupervised and supervised learning models that address the challenges that come with the lack of enterprise attack metadata for ground truth validation as well as insufficient data for training the models. We validate our models on a binary classification problem that attempts to predict cyber attacks on a daily basis for an organization. Using several controlled studies on features leveraging the network structure, we measure the extent to which the indicators from the darkweb forums can be successfully used to predict attacks. We use information from 53 forums in the darkweb over a span of 17 months for the task. Our framework to predict real world organization cyber attacks of 3 different security events, suggest that focusing on the reply path structure between groups of users based on random walk transitions and community structures has an advantage in terms of better performance solely relying on forum or user posting statistics prior to attacks.

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All your cards are belong to us: Understanding online carding forums

Cited by 20 publications

References 22 publications

CrimeBB

CrimeBB

Stolen account credentials: an empirical comparison of online dissemination on different platforms

Mining user interaction patterns in the darkweb to predict enterprise cyber incidents

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