TY - GEN
T1 - Exploring Differences among Darknet and Surface Internet Hacking Communities
AU - Ding, Zhiyuan
AU - Benjamin, Victor
AU - Li, Weifeng
AU - Yin, Xueyan
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research was supported in part by NSF CNS-1936370.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Cyber-threat intelligence (CTI) has matured into its own industry within recent years. CTI efforts frequently involve scrutinizing data within Darknet communities to understand emerging threats. Many hackers within the Darknet share knowledge and other information through a variety of formats, including video. At the same time, many hackers are also making use of the 'surface' Internet and traditional video-sharing platforms to disseminate hacking knowledge. Gleaning intelligence from the Darknet can be a very laborious and costly task, raising the question of how meaningful and valuable are the hacker patterns that can be observed on the surface Internet. Extant research contains no studies that compare and contrast hacking videos uploaded to the Darknet versus those uploaded to traditional Internet communities. In this research-in-progress, a testbed of hacking videos is constructed by sourcing videos from a popular video-sharing website, as well as several Darknet forums. The testbed is scrutinized to understand differences in how the populations of users watching such videos respond to them, and whether there are any unique engagement patterns that emerge within the Darknet and surface Internet populations. The results of this work serve to justify further investigations into the hacker knowledge gap between the Darknet and the traditional Internet.
AB - Cyber-threat intelligence (CTI) has matured into its own industry within recent years. CTI efforts frequently involve scrutinizing data within Darknet communities to understand emerging threats. Many hackers within the Darknet share knowledge and other information through a variety of formats, including video. At the same time, many hackers are also making use of the 'surface' Internet and traditional video-sharing platforms to disseminate hacking knowledge. Gleaning intelligence from the Darknet can be a very laborious and costly task, raising the question of how meaningful and valuable are the hacker patterns that can be observed on the surface Internet. Extant research contains no studies that compare and contrast hacking videos uploaded to the Darknet versus those uploaded to traditional Internet communities. In this research-in-progress, a testbed of hacking videos is constructed by sourcing videos from a popular video-sharing website, as well as several Darknet forums. The testbed is scrutinized to understand differences in how the populations of users watching such videos respond to them, and whether there are any unique engagement patterns that emerge within the Darknet and surface Internet populations. The results of this work serve to justify further investigations into the hacker knowledge gap between the Darknet and the traditional Internet.
KW - Cybersecurity
KW - Darknet
KW - Video Analytics
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U2 - 10.1109/ISI53945.2021.9624681
DO - 10.1109/ISI53945.2021.9624681
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85123478882
T3 - Proceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2021
BT - Proceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2021
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 19th Annual IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2021
Y2 - 2 November 2021 through 3 November 2021
ER -