Tor: A Place of Freedom or a Criminal’s Paradise (original) (raw)

Fighting cybercrime differs from tackling conventional criminal activity in both technical and legal aspects. To execute effective operations, law enforcement has to possess significant understanding of computer technology and to follow the latest developments in the area of network security. At the same time, they are bound by criminal procedure which has to be adapted to new circumstances in order to provide effective, yet not excessively intrusive, legal instruments. Cybercrime is a global phenomenon. Cybercriminals have already transnational access to computers, software, and information. As a result, such crimes require the attention of national authorities. This article analyses the main challenges encountered by law enforcement and the involvement of Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) agencies when it comes to countering cybercrime operations.

Internet users have a name, a surname and a history: searches, place visited, products bought, etc – that is an online identity linked to their online behaviour. Tracking cookies keep them logged in, smartphones require to create a personal account and to be logged in order to be used. The exchange between users and corporation consists in agreeing to the terms of service for the former – which allow these corporations to deploy data – and to provide services and products for the latter. In everyday life this practice has become so common that has blurred users’ awareness of how they have turn out to be controlled.

This policy brief examines the expansion of drug markets on the Dark Net or ‘hidden web’ and the challenges they pose for both law enforcement agencies and the international legal framework within which those agencies ultimately operate.

In recent years, the Darknet has become one of the most discussed topics in cyber security circles. Current academic studies and media reports tend to highlight how the anonymous nature of the Darknet is used to facilitate criminal activities. This paper reports on a recent research project in four Darknet forums that reveals a different aspect of the Darknet. Drawing on our qualitative fndings, we suggest that many users of the Darknet might not perceive it as intrinsically criminogenic, despite their acknowledgement of various kinds of criminal activity in this network. Further, our research participants emphasised on the achievement of constructive socio-political values through the use of the Darknet. This achievement is enabled by various characteristics that are rooted in the Darknet’s technological structure, such as anonymity, privacy, and the use of cryptocurrencies. These characteristics provide a wide range of opportunities for good as well as for evil.

After the information released by Edward Snowden, the world realized about the security risks of high surveillance from governments to citizens or among governments, and how it can affect the freedom, democracy, and peace. And organizations such as WikiLeaks has shown just how much data is collected to include the poor security controls in place to protect that information. Research has been carried out for the creation of the necessary tools for the countermeasures to all these surveillance. One of the most potent tools is the Tails system as a complement of The Onion Router (TOR). Even though there are limitations and flaws, the progress has been significant, and we are moving in the right direction. As more individuals and organizations fall under a watchful eye on their Internet activities then maintaining anonymity it not only essential for getting out information but one's safety.

Internet-based crime is a looming problem. Some crimes, such as the sale of drugs and guns and the distribution of child abuse imagery, have shifted into the applications, forums and chatrooms of the Internet. Other crimes, such as data breaches and identity theft, ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks, are launched via the infrastructure of the network. Cybersecurity policies designed to counter these activities have predictably different effects across the various types of Internet-based crime. Dark Web indexing and Internet service provider botnet mitigation strategies, for example, affect some forms of cybercrime more than others. In particular, this paper outlines how Internet-based crime varies along a continuum from crime in the applications of the Internet to crime via the infrastructure of the system. It then shows how cybersecurity strategies have differential effects across the various cybercrime types.

After the information released by Edward Snowden, the world realized about the security risks of high surveillance from governments to citizens or among governments , and how it can affect the freedom, democracy and/or peace. Research has been carried out for the creation of the necessary tools for the countermeasures to all this surveillance. One of the more powerful tools is the Tails system as a complement of The Onion Router (TOR). Even though there are limitations and flaws, the progress has been significant and we are moving in the right direction.

This work presents an overview of some of the tools that cybercriminals employ to trade securely. It will look at the weaknesses of these tools and how the behavior of cybercriminals will sometimes lead them to use tools in a nonoptimal manner, creating opportunities for law enforcement to identify and apprehend them. The criminal domain this article focuses on is carding, the online trade in stolen payment card details and the consequent criminal misuse of such data. However, these findings could be applied more broadly, as many of the analyzed tools are used across (cyber) criminal domains. This article is a continuation of earlier work, in which a crime script analysis of 25 carding tutorials presented the tools that cybercriminals use to cash-out stolen payment card details while remaining anonymous. We use these tutorials and an analysis of the literature to identify how they can be used incorrectly and create a typology of potential behavioral and technological pitfalls in these tools. Finally, we conclude that finding pitfalls in the usage of tools by cybercriminals has the potential to increase the efficiency of disruption, interception, and prevention approaches. However, in future work, interviews with law enforcement experts and convicted cybercriminals or still active users should be used to analyze the operational security of cybercriminals in more depth.

Our paper analyzes the determinants of network structure and hierarchy by examining various black market networks. We examine structures of networks in the Internet Dark Net (virtual) using an agent-based model and compare it to network structures of traditional black markets (ground), also laid out using agent-based modeling. Our agent-based model is based on characteristics of the Dark Net, as laid out by Hardy and Norgaard in Reputation in the Internet Black Market: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis on the Dark Web. The purpose of modeling these two different types of illicit markets is to understand the network structure that emerges from the interactions of the agents in each environment. Traditional black markets are relatively hierarchical, with high degree and high betweenness. We compare the density and average length of shortest path of the simulated ground black market networks with our simulated virtual network. We find that hierarchy in networks is a product of differences in transaction costs and information asymmetries. The Internet is an effective way to lower both of these aspects of network structure. We observe that the network structure surrounding the interactions in the virtual black market is less hierarchical than the network structure of the ground market. 2 PRELIMINARY DRAFT—DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE