Cheaper than you thought? A dive into the darkweb market of cyber-crime products

Abstract

The darkweb is nowadays considered a very popular place to sell and buy illegal cyber-crime related content. From botnet services and malware, to user data such as credit card information and passwords, darkweb marketplaces offer ease of use, product variety, and most importantly effective anonymity to both buyers and vendors. In this paper, we crawl 8 popular darkweb marketplaces and perform a comprehensive quantitative analysis with a focus on cyber-crime related products. Moreover, we report some preliminary findings when examining the same marketplaces through their I2P mirrors. Our results suggest that overall there is a multitude of products that fall into the cyber-crime category, with products under the Fraud category dominating the market, and that the average cyber-crime products’ price is relatively low. Furthermore, we explore how the vendors of this specific product group are distributed across platforms, utilizing harvested information such as usernames and PGP keys, and investigate how their reputation scores affect their operation.