DARK WEB − AS CHALLENGE OF THE CONTEMPORARY INFORMATION AGE

Reconnaissance and monitoring activities of actors on the Internet are becoming indispensable security tools for governments around the world. The Deep Web as part of the Internet protects actors. However, cheap and reliable encryption and online identity protection have become attractive to state and non-state actors in the cyber domain. Unfortunately, part of the Deep Web, the Dark Web is now offering to training terrorists, and trading arms and illicit substances. The Dark Web represents a communication and information systems infrastructure where actors are anonymous and the services are adaptable to the demands of geopolitical circumstances. This paper analyzes the ways of using the Dark Web and its impact on the information environment since the global war on terrorism began, through a period when humanity struggled with Covid-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine. © 2023 Authors.

Woe is the dark Web: the main challenges that governments of the Commonwealth Caribbean will face in combating dark Web-facilitated criminal activities

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the potential challenges that governments in the Commonwealth Caribbean are likely to face combating crimes facilitated by the dark Web.Design/methodology/approachThe "lived experience” methodology guided by a contextual systematic literature review was used to ground the investigation of the research phenomena in the researchers' collective experiences working in, living in and engaging in research with governments in the Commonwealth Caribbean.FindingsThe two major findings emerging from the analysis are that jurisdictional and technical challenges are producing major hindrances to the creation of an efficient and authoritative legislative framework and the building of the capacity of governments in the Commonwealth Caribbean to confront the technicalities that affect systematic efforts to manage problems created by the dark Web.Practical implicationsThe findings indicate the urgency that authorities in the Caribbean region must place on reevaluating their administrative, legislative and investment priorities to emphasize cyber-risk management strategies that will enable their seamless and wholesome integration into this digital world.Originality/valueThe research aids in developing and extending theory and praxis related to the problematization of the dark Web for governments by situating the experiences of Small Island Developing States into the ongoing discourse.

C-OSINT: COVID-19 Open Source artificial INTelligence framework

With the emergence of COVID-19 disease worldwide, a market of the products related to this disease formed across the Internet. By the time these goods were in short supply, many uncontrolled Dark Web Marketplaces (DWM) were active in selling these products. At the same time, Dark Web Forums (DWF) became proxies for spreading false ideas, fake news about COVID-19, and advertising products sold in DWMs. This study investigates the activities entertained in the DWMs and DWFs to propose a learning-based model to distinguish them from their related counterparts on the surface web. To this end, we propose a COVID-19 Open Source artificial INTelligence framework (C-OSINT) to automatically collect and classify the activities done in DWMs and DWFs. Moreover, we corporate linguistic and stylistic solutions to leverage the classification performance between the content found in DWMs and DWFs and two surface web sources. Our results show that using syntactic and stylistic representation outperforms the Transformer based results over these domains. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Examining the trends and operations of modern Dark-Web marketplaces

Currently, the Dark Web is one key platform for the online trading of illegal products and services. Analysing the.onion sites hosting marketplaces is of interest for law enforcement and security researchers. This paper presents a study on 123k listings obtained from 6 different Dark Web markets. While most of current works leverage existing datasets, these are outdated and might not contain new products, e.g., those related to the 2020 COVID pandemic. Thus, we build a custom focused crawler to collect the data. Being able to conduct analyses on current data is of considerable importance as these marketplaces continue to change and grow, both in terms of products offered and users. Also, there are several anti-crawling mechanisms being improved, making this task more difficult and, consequently, reducing the amount of data obtained in recent years on these marketplaces. We conduct a data analysis evaluating multiple characteristics regarding the products, sellers, and markets. These characteristics include, among others, the number of sales, existing categories in the markets, the origin of the products and the sellers. Our study sheds light on the products and services being offered in these markets nowadays. Moreover, we have conducted a case study on one particular productive and dynamic drug market, i.e., Cannazon. Our initial goal was to understand its evolution over time, analyzing the variation of products in stock and their price longitudinally. We realized, though, that during the period of study the market suffered a DDoS attack which damaged its reputation and affected users' trust on it, which was a potential reason which lead to the subsequent closure of the market by its operators. Consequently, our study provides insights regarding the last days of operation of such a productive market, and showcases the effectiveness of a potential intervention approach by means of disrupting the service and fostering mistrust. © 2022 IEEE.

Upside Down: Exploring the Ecosystem of Dark Web Data Markets

Large-scale dark web marketplaces have been around for more than a decade. So far, academic research has mainly focused on drug and hacking-related offers. However, data markets remain understudied, especially given their volatile nature and distinct characteristics based on shifting iterations. In this paper, we perform a large-scale study on dark web data markets. We first characterize data markets by using an innovative theoretical legal taxonomy based on the Council of Europe’s Cybercrime Convention and its implementation in Dutch law. The recent Covid-19 pandemic showed that cybercrime has become more prevalent with the increase of digitalization in society. In this context, important questions arise regarding how cybercrime harms are determined, measured, and prioritized. We propose a determination of harm based on criminal law qualifications and sanctions. We also address the empirical question of what the economic activity on data markets looks like nowadays by performing a comprehensive measurement of digital goods based on an original dataset scraped from twelve marketplaces consisting of approximately 28,000 offers from 642 vendors. The resulting analysis combines insights from the theoretical legal framework and the results of the measurement study. To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine these two elements systematically. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

The use of the Dark Web as a COVID-19 information source: A three-country study.

The Dark Web (i.e., the anonymous web or Darknet) contains potentially harmful COVID-19-related information and content such as conspiracy theories and forged certificates. The Dark Web may particularly attract individuals who are suspicious about the pandemic, but there is no research concerning the use of the Dark Web as a COVID-19 information source. In this study, we investigated the role of COVID-19 skepticism, online activities, and loneliness in the use of the Dark Web platforms as a COVID-19 information source. The data (N = 3000) were gathered in April 2021 from 18 to 75-year-old respondents from Finland (n = 1000), Sweden (n = 1000) and the United Kingdom (n = 1000). The respondents were asked how often they had utilized Dark Web platforms (for example via TOR-network) as a COVID-19 information source during the pandemic. Self-reported measures of institutional trust, anti-vaccine stances, restriction obedience, online activities, and loneliness were used as predictors in the logistic regression model. Age, gender, and education were also included in the model. The Dark Web use was more prevalent in the UK and Sweden. There was an association between anti-vaccine stances and active Dark Web use in the UK and Sweden, while low institutional trust predicted use among Finnish respondents. In all countries, restriction disobedience was related to Dark Web use as a COVID-19 information source. Frequent online gambling, increased social media use, and loneliness predicted Dark Web use, and these associations were even stronger among frequent Dark Web users than occasional users. Younger age and male gender were also associated with Dark Web use. The unregulated nature of the Dark Web makes it a risky alternative to COVID-19 information, attracting individuals who are suspicious about the pandemic and overall active online users. Misleading information and availability of forged certificates on the Dark Web challenge official health policies, posing significant risks for both individual and public health.

Dark Web in Modern World Theoretical Perspective: A survey

The Internet as a whole is a large network of interconnected computer networks and their supporting infrastructure which is divided into 3 parts. The web is a list of websites that can be accessed using search engines like Google, Firefox, and others, this is called as Surface Web. The Internet's layers stretch well beyond the surface material that many people can quickly reach in their everyday searches. The Deep Web material, which cannot be indexed by regular search engines like Google, is a subset of the internet. The Dark Web, which extends to the deepest reaches of the Deep Web, contains data that has been purposefully hidden. Tor may be used to access the dark web. Tor employs a network of volunteer devices to route users' web traffic via a succession of other users' computers, making it impossible to track it back to the source. We will analyze and include results about the Dark Web's presence in various spheres of society in this paper. Further we take dive into about the Tor metrics how the relay list is revised after users are determined based on client requests for directories (using TOR metrics). Other way we can estimate the number of users in anonymous networks. This analysis discusses the purposes for which it is frequently used, with a focus on cybercrime, as well as how law enforcement plays the adversary position. The analysis discusses these secret Dark Web markets, what services they provide, and the events that take place there such as cybercrime, illegal money transfers, sensitive communication etc. Before knowing anything about Dark Web, how a rookie can make mistake of letting any threat or malware into his system. This problem can be tackled by knowing whether to use Windows, or any other OS, or any other service like VPN to enter Dark world. The paper also goes into the agenda of how much of illegal community is involved from India in these markets and what impact does COVID-19 had on Dark Web markets. Our analysis is carried out by searching scholarly journal databases for current literature. By acting as a reference guide and presenting a research agenda, it contributes to the field of the dark web in an efficient way. This paper is totally built for study purposes and precautionary measures for accessing Dark Web. © 2022 IEEE.

Characteristics and Behaviors of Anonymous Users of Dark Web Platforms Suspected of Child Sexual Offenses.

International law enforcement have noted a rise in the use of the Dark Web to facilitate and commit sexual offenses against children, both prior to and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study presented here therefore aimed to investigate the characteristics and behaviors of anonymous users of Dark Web platforms who were suspected of engaging in the sexual abuse of children. Naturally-occurring data on 53 anonymous suspects, who were active on the Dark Web and had come to police attention in the United Kingdom (UK), were sampled. Analysis of the data yielded 462 features that could be coded reliably. Analysis of these features provided novel insights into suspects' characteristics, their motivations for using the Dark Web, the nature of the offending behavior they reported engaging in, their technical and security precautions, sexual interests, and the content of their interactions with one another. Findings are discussed in relation to theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research.

Dark Web Marketplaces and COVID-19: before the vaccine.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), medicines (e.g., hydroxyclorochine), and medical frauds. Finally, we compare trends in their temporal evolution with variations in public attention, as measured by Twitter posts and Wikipedia page visits. We reveal how the online shadow economy has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the importance of a continuous monitoring of DWMs, especially now that real vaccines are available and in short supply. We anticipate our analysis will be of interest both to researchers and public agencies focused on the protection of public health.