Entanglement: Cybercrime Connections of an Internet Marketing Forum Population

02/03/2022
by   Masarah Paquet-Clouston, et al.
0

Many activities related to cybercrime operations do not require much secrecy, such as developing websites or translating texts. This research provides indications that many users of a popular public internet marketing forum have connections to cybercrime. It does so by investigating the involvement in cybercrime of a population of users interested in internet marketing, both at a micro and macro scale. The research starts with a case study of three users confirmed to be involved in cybercrime and their use of the public forum where users share information about online advertising. It provides a first glimpse that some business with cybercrime connection is being conducted in the clear. The study then pans out to investigate the forum population's ties with cybercrime by finding crossover users, who are users from the public forum who also comment on cybercrime forums. The cybercrime forums on which they discuss are analyzed and crossover users' strength of participation is reported. Also, to assess if they represent a sub-group of the forum population, their posting behavior on the public forum is compared with that of non-crossover users. This blend of analyses shows that (i) a minimum of 7.2 population are crossover users that have ties with cybercrime forums; (ii) their participation in cybercrime forums is limited; and (iii) their posting behavior is relatively indistinguishable from that of non-crossover users. This is the first study to formally quantify how users of an internet marketing public forum, a space for informal exchanges, have ties to cybercrime activities. We conclude that crossover users are a substantial part of the population in the public forum, and, even though they have thus far been overlooked, their aggregated effect in the ecosystem must be considered.

READ FULL TEXT

page 7

page 11

research
10/08/2019

Online Surveys and Digital Demography in the Developing World: Facebook Users in Kenya

Digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Amazon Mecha...
research
06/26/2023

Your Code is 0000: An Analysis of the Disposable Phone Numbers Ecosystem

Short Message Service (SMS) is a popular channel for online service prov...
research
09/28/2022

Personalization of Web Search During the 2020 US Elections

Search engines play a central role in routing political information to c...
research
11/27/2018

Large-scale analysis of user exposure to online advertising in Facebook

Online advertising is the major source of income for a large portion of ...
research
02/14/2020

The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis in Stack Overflow

According to the goal-gradient hypothesis, people increase their efforts...
research
10/18/2019

Support for public-key infrastructures in DNS

Traditionally, publicly available repositories of certificates offer the...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset