Ransomware payments in the Bitcoin ecosystem

Paquet-Clouston, Masarah; Haslhofer, Bernhard; Dupont, Benoît

doi:10.1093/cybsec/tyz003

Cited by 135 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(45 reference statements)

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“…Because the Bitcoin transaction graph is completely public it is clear that Bitcoin flows can be traced, although this is limited by merging transactions [24]. Recent analysis of ransomware attacks and associated bitcoin transactions can be found in [9], [16], [21].…”

Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain

Jourdan

Blandin

Wynter

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW)

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Bitcoin has created a new exchange paradigm within which financial transactions can be trusted without an intermediary. This premise of a free decentralized transactional network however requires, in its current implementation, unrestricted access to the ledger for peer-based transaction verification. A number of studies have shown that, in this pseudonymous context, identities can be leaked based on transaction features or offnetwork information. In this work, we analyze the information revealed by the pattern of transactions in the neighborhood of a given entity transaction. By definition, these features which pertain to an extended network are not directly controllable by the entity, but might enable leakage of information about transacting entities. We define a number of new features relevant to entity characterization on the Bitcoin Blockchain and study their efficacy in practice. We show that even a weak attacker with shallow data mining knowledge is able to leverage these features to characterize the entity properties.

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Section: B Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain

Jourdan

Blandin

Wynter

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW)

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“…Survey evidence suggests that many businesses do indeed pay the ransom [8]. We also have evidence of large profits for ransomware criminals [9,10]. The example of South Korean web-hosting firm Nayana paying a $1 million ransom in 2017 amply demonstrates how lucrative ransomware can be for criminals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Ransomware and Reputation

Cartwright

2019

Games

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Ransomware is a particular form of cyber-attack in which a victim loses access to either his electronic device or files unless he pays a ransom to criminals. A criminal's ability to make money from ransomware critically depends on victims believing that the criminal will honour ransom payments. In this paper we explore the extent to which a criminal can build trust through reputation. We demonstrate that there are situations in which it is optimal for the criminal to always return the files and situations in which it is not. We argue that the ability to build reputation will depend on how victims distinguish between different ransomware strands. If ransomware is to survive as a long term revenue source for criminals then they need to find ways of building a good reputation.

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“…Therefore, the proposed study offers two techniques to uncover Bitcoin transactions. First, there are many empirical studies in the information technology area that discuss techniques to reduce the anonymity of bitcoin transactions [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [1].…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Once the bitcoin address is attached to a person, we will house that information in a separate database that holds blacklisted bitcoin addresses. As displayed in Figure 3, our model consists of ten steps: 1) Method-1: Test proposed algorithms by researchers to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions used in ransomware attacks 2) Method-2: Identify ransomware related Bitcoin addresses and track the incoming and outgoing traffic as explained in Paquet-Clouston et al's study [1].…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Prevention and a Traction System for Ransomware Attacks

Ozer

Varlioglu

Gonen

et al. 2019

2019 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)

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Over the past three years, especially following Wan-naCry malware, ransomware has become one of the biggest concerns for private businesses, state, and local government agencies. According to Homeland Security statistics, 1.5 million ransomware attacks have occurred per year since 2016. Cybercriminals often use creative methods to inject their malware into the target machines and use sophisticated cryptographic techniques to hold hostage victims' files and programs unless a certain amount of equivalent Bitcoin is paid. The return to the cybercriminals is so high (estimated $1 billion in 2019) without any cost because of the advanced anonymity provided by cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin [1]. Given this context, this study first discusses the current state of ransomware, detection, and prevention systems. Second, we propose a global ransomware center to better manage our concerted efforts against cybercriminals. The policy implications of the proposed study are discussed in the conclusion section. 1

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Ransomware payments in the Bitcoin ecosystem

Cited by 135 publications

References 19 publications

Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain

Characterizing Entities in the Bitcoin Blockchain

Ransomware and Reputation

A Prevention and a Traction System for Ransomware Attacks

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