Plug and Prey? Measuring the Commoditization of Cybercrime via Online Anonymous Markets
summary
Longitudinal scraping of eight anonymous markets including Silk Road and AlphaBay from 2011–2017 yields 230k listings, ~16k vendors and 4M feedbacks, classified with an SVM trained on 1,500 labels at ~80% precision. Findings show commoditization exists but is partial: cash-out services dominate revenue, only 10% of vendors produce 80% of income (≈220 vendors), substantial retail B2C offers appear, and total measured market revenue is ~$15M total. Outsourcing options remain constrained and transaction volumes are modest.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:30The question
- 3:08Silk Road example
- 4:59Measuring Commoditization
- 6:12Cybercrime Business Models
- 7:40Data Source
- 8:27Listing Analysis
- 9:58Pre Filtering
- 10:57Ground Truth
- 12:53Classifier Performance
- 13:19BusinesstoBusiness
- 15:34Overall Picture
- 18:44Specific Markets
- 19:31Conclusions
- 20:24Summary
- 21:10Questions
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