Malevolent Information Crawling Mechanism for Forming Structured Illegal Organisations in Hidden Networks

Malevolent Information Crawling Mechanism for Forming Structured Illegal Organisations in Hidden Networks

Romil Rawat, Sonali Gupta, S. Sivaranjani, Om Kumar C.U., Megha Kuliha, K. Sakthidasan Sankaran
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/IJCWT.311422
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Abstract

Terrorist groups like ISIS have made considerable use of the dark web (DW) to carry out their malicious objectives such as spreading propaganda, recruiting and radicalizing new recruits, and secretly raising finances. Al-Hayat Media Center, an ISIS media agency, released a link on their forum describing how to access their DW website. It also sent out the identical message over Telegram, which included links to a Tor service with a “.onion” address. This study develops an analytical framework for scraping and analyzing the DW on the internet. The authors successfully tested a web crawler to collect account information for thousands of merchants and their related marketplace listings using a case study marketplace. The paper explains how to scrape DW marketplaces in the most viable and effective way possible. The findings of the case study support the validity of the proposed analytical framework, which is useful for academics researching this emerging phenomena as well as investigators looking into illegal behavior on the DW.
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1. Introduction

The Darknet (DN) (Kontogiannis et al., 2021) can supply everything the darkest region of the evil human imagination can create with anonymity and impunity. In the DN (Samtani et al., 2021) (Razaque et al., 2021) (Pannu et al., 2018) (Rawat et al., 2022a) (Rawat et al., 2022b) (Mahor et al.,2022a) (Mahor et al.,2022b) everything goes:

  • •

    Based on the urban tale of “Red Chambers” (Davies, 2020), which allows for the live transmission of gruesome murders or torture.

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    Necrophilia, cannibalism, and paedophilia are examples of dirty perversions.

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    DN markets like “Silk Road” (Monterrubio et al., 2022), its avatars, and “Alpha Bay” openly sell child pornography, illegal drugs, rocket launchers, explosives, and even human organs.

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    As part of a larger DN people-trafficking network, DN websites such as 'Besa Mafia,' associated with the Albanian mafia, and 'Azerbaijan Eagles,' provide hitmen for hire services for contract assassinations for up to USD 5000.

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    DN websites (Samtani et al., 2021) (Razaque et al., 2021) (Pannu et al., 2018) (Rawat et al., 2022a) (Rawat et al., 2022b) selling over 100 GB of movies, including lascivious child pornography, are now defunct.

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    Conspiracy theories alleging the moon landing was a hoax or the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the United States themselves have sparked anxiety and scepticism.

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    Counterfeit money, forged passports, fake driver's licences

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    Millions of credit card numbers are on sale in cryptic DN marketplaces cloaked in mystery. As a result, considerations like legal or unlawful, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical melt into obscurity in the enigmatic realm of DN.

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