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Computer-Supported Cooperative Crime

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8975))

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Abstract

This work addresses fundamental questions about the nature of cybercriminal organization. We investigate the organization of three underground forums: BlackhatWorld, Carders and L33tCrew to understand the nature of distinct communities within a forum, the structure of organization and the impact of enforcement, in particular banning members, on the structure of these forums. We find that each forum is divided into separate competing communities. Smaller communities are limited to 100–230 members, have a two-tiered hierarchy akin to a gang, and focus on a subset of cybercrime activities. Larger communities may have thousands of members and a complex organization with a distributed multi-tiered hierarchy more akin to a mob; such communities also have a more diverse cybercrime portfolio compared to smaller cohorts. Finally, despite differences in size and cybercrime portfolios, members on a single forum have similar operational practices, for example, they use the same electronic currency.

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Acknowledgment

We thank the anonymous reviewers and our shepherd Jens Grossklags for their valuable feedback. We are grateful to Damon McCoy for providing us access to the dataset. This work is supported by Intel through the ISTC for Secure Computing and National Science Foundation CNS-1347151.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

    Vaibhav Garg, Rebekah Overdorf & Rachel Greenstadt

  2. UC Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Sadia Afroz

Authors
  1. Vaibhav Garg
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  2. Sadia Afroz
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  3. Rebekah Overdorf
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  4. Rachel Greenstadt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sadia Afroz .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Rainer Böhme

  2. NTT Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan

    Tatsuaki Okamoto

A Example of Social Networks

A Example of Social Networks

Figures 1 and 2 show the structure of the communities in Carders. Here, nodes are scaled according to their degree centrality.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

The largest community of Carders does not have any one central big node.

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Fig. 2.
figure 2

Three communities of Carders: Community 12 (purple), 13 (green), 14 (brown)(Color figure online).

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Garg, V., Afroz, S., Overdorf, R., Greenstadt, R. (2015). Computer-Supported Cooperative Crime. In: Böhme, R., Okamoto, T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-47853-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-47854-7

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