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Shedding Light on Monopoly: Temporal Analysis of Drug Trades

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Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime (ICDF2C 2022)

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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. 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. 2.

    Publicly available source code can be found on this GitHub repository https://github.com/onionltd/EndGame.

  3. 3.

    Review available at https://darknetlive.com/markets/monopoly-market/.

  4. 4.

    https://gitlab.nesad.fit.vutbr.cz/papers/icdf2c22-shedding-light-on-monopoly.

  5. 5.

    https://bazar.fit.vutbr.cz/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Božetěchova 1/2, Brno, Czech Republic

    Daniel Dolejška, Vladimír Veselý, Jan Pluskal & Michal Koutenský

Authors
  1. Daniel Dolejška
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  2. Vladimír Veselý
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  3. Jan Pluskal
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  4. Michal Koutenský
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Dolejška .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Sanjay Goel

  2. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Pavel Gladyshev

  3. Horangi Cyber Security, Singapore, Singapore

    Akatyev Nikolay

  4. Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, USA

    George Markowsky

  5. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Daryl Johnson

A Figures

A Figures

Fig. 11.
figure 11

Complete Dataset Database ER Diagram

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© 2023 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36574-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-36573-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-36574-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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