Understanding the Black Market in Internet Crime
Here’s a interesting paper from Carnegie Mellon University: “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants.”
The paper focuses on the large illicit market that specializes in the commoditization of activities in support of Internet-based crime. The main goal of the paper was to understand and measure how these markets function, and discuss the incentives of the various market entities. Using a dataset collected over seven months and comprising over 13 million messages, they were able to categorize the market’s participants, the goods and services advertised, and the asking prices for selected interesting goods.
Really cool stuff.
Unfortunately, the data is extremely noisy and so far the authors have no way to cross-validate it, so it is difficult to make any strong conclusions.
The press focused on just one thing: a discussion of general ways to disrupt the market. Contrary to the claims of the article, the authors have not built any tools to disrupt the markets.
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mfheadcase • October 29, 2007 4:08 PM
Ummm, the methods for blackmarket disruption focused on by the secondary articles, would work yes… but they also invite retaliation on the straight market.
A couple of black hats could just as well turn their botnets toward disruption of legit commerce using similar methods.
Not to mention that the methods basically come down to slander and fraud if they were used against people in a legit market.