DMiNority Report:On Monitoring Cyber-Crime Innovation in Dark Net Markets

Abstract

The Dark Web is often the primary meeting point of both the beginning of collaborations and end of cybercrime fulfilment such as sale of breached data. Such collaborations show a high level of “entrepreneurship” as (often anonymous) users are in constant dialog to create novel forms of activity, often collaboratively devising techniques to evade law enforcement. This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project between Computer Science (Cybersecurity) and Social Sciences (Entrepreneurship). Our key question is whether we can identify patterns of “innovation” well before put in practice. To this end, we first show a machine-learning approach to detection of topics of conversation for the forum Dread over 7 years and then show a model from Entrepreneurship on how the Dark Web innovates. From here, we outline the design of a monitoring and detection tool which takes into account human patterns and context rather than pure content analysis.