The Dark Crawler

The darkweb is a part of the internet that requires specialized software to access it. Tor remains the most prominent darkweb in existence. Qualitative analysis has previously focused on case studies in Tor such as the Silk Road which is only one small piece of the network. Websites are connected through hyperlinks which allows information to flow within Tor. This study explores the ways that Tor nodes are using these pathways and identifies core sites […]

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The Tor Network, a hidden part of the Internet, is becoming an ideal hosting ground for illegal activities and services, including large drug markets, financial frauds, espionage, child sexual abuse. Researchers and law enforcement rely on manual investigations, which are both time-consuming and ultimately inefficient. The first part of this paper explores illicit and criminal content identified by prominent researchers in the dark web. We previously developed a web crawler that automatically searches websites on […]

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Information threatening the security of critical infrastructures are exchanged over the Internet through communication platforms, such as online discussion forums. This information can be used by malicious hackers to attack critical computer networks and data systems. Much of the literature on the hacking of critical infrastructure has focused on developing typologies of cyber-attacks, but has not examined the communication activities of the actors involved. To address this gap in the literature, the language of hackers […]

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The goal of this paper was to analyze hacker forums to better understand the threats they pose to Canadian critical systems specifically and cyber-security more generally. To facilitate the data collection, a customized web-crawler was developed to specifically capture the structured content posted to forums. Three hacker forums were selected for analysis that represented different facets of the hacker community: carding (data theft), coding (malware development and deployment), and security (distribution of vulnerabilities). We identified and […]

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This research utilizes social network analysis to determine the success of three different disruption strategies on a child exploitation network extracted from the public internet. Using a custom-written web-crawler called LECEN, data from a set of hyperlinked child-exploitation websites was collected from the Internet. From these data, two types of networks were coded: the nodes of the first network consisted of only website domains, while the nodes of the second were generated using the registrant […]

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