Abstract
Dark marketplaces pioneered a new way to monetise illicit goods. A unique combination of technologies (such as overlay networks, end-to-end encryption, and cryptocurrencies) guarantees anonymity for dark marketplace users (including operators, vendors, and buyers).
We have developed a tool for monitoring and investigating dark marketplaces (namely, collecting and processing evidence directly from their websites), which we used for real-time detection of various illicit activities.
This paper presents a well-described and structured dataset that contains high-frequency web-scraped information from Monopoly Market (one of the most popular dark marketplaces in 2021). The evaluation demonstrates how high-resolution temporal analysis can reveal mission-critical information about the frequency of trades, vendor activities, and the drug market.
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Notes
- 1.
On the one hand, we purposely do not want to mention the name of any company or product. On the other hand, we want to provide at least some leads for the reader interested in getting more information. Therefore, we advise checking out participants of commercial cybersecurity conferences for LEAs such as ISS World, Milipol, or Security and Policing.
- 2.
Publicly available source code can be found on this GitHub repository https://github.com/onionltd/EndGame.
- 3.
Review available at https://darknetlive.com/markets/monopoly-market/.
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Dolejška, D., Veselý, V., Pluskal, J., Koutenský, M. (2023). Shedding Light on Monopoly: Temporal Analysis of Drug Trades. In: Goel, S., Gladyshev, P., Nikolay, A., Markowsky, G., Johnson, D. (eds) Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime. ICDF2C 2022. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 508. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36574-4_9
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