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Shedding Light on Dark Korea: An In-Depth Analysis and Profiling of the Dark Web in Korea

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Book cover Information Security Applications (WISA 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11897))

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Abstract

The Dark Web sites are operated over anonymity-preserving protocols like Tor, making users of the Dark Web services more resilient to identification and monitoring. Although some previous works have focused on understanding the size of the Dark Web services and investigating their criminal activities, there is a lack of research on chronological analysis and in-depth profiling of the Dark Web sites, particularly in South Korea. Therefore, in this study, we implemented a Dark Web crawling system, and collected seed and sub Dark Web URLs using it. Then, the 3,000 Dark Web sites from the seed URLs were selected and their web pages were captured for profiling. An in-depth analysis was then conducted on the collected 3,000 Dark Web sites, and an intensive categorization was performed on the basis of their major criminal activities. We then carried out an in-depth profiling for top 3 Korean Dark Web sites to investigate cyber criminal activities in South Korea. In the profiling, criminal activities were collected and analyzed in a chronological point of view. Personal information leakage and Sybil IDs in the Dark Web were also identified based on the PGP keys we collected.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, when we applied this approach to HiGH KOREA, which is the largest Dark Web site in Korea, we could increase the number of the collected web pages from 792 to 7,740.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Institute of Information communications Technology Planning Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.2018-0-00269, A research on safe and convenient big data processing methods), (No.2019-0-01697, Development of Automated Vulnerability Discovery Technologies for Blockchain Platform Security).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, 145, Anam-ro, 136-701, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Korea

    Jinhee Lee, Younggee Hong, Hyunsoo Kwon & Junbeom Hur

Authors
  1. Jinhee Lee
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  2. Younggee Hong
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  3. Hyunsoo Kwon
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  4. Junbeom Hur
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Junbeom Hur .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Korea (Republic of)

    Ilsun You

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Lee, J., Hong, Y., Kwon, H., Hur, J. (2020). Shedding Light on Dark Korea: An In-Depth Analysis and Profiling of the Dark Web in Korea. In: You, I. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11897. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39303-8_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39303-8_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39302-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39303-8

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