Centro de Documentação da PJ
Monografia
 CD258 |
Examining the structure, organization, and processes of the international market for stolen data [Documento electrónico] / Thomas J. Holt, Olga Smirnova.- [Rockville, MD] : National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), 2014.- 1 CD-ROM ; 12 cm
Research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, Award Number: 2010-IJ-CX-1676. Ficheiro de 8,93 MB em formato PDF (156 p.).
PROTECÇÃO E SEGURANÇA DE DADOS, CRIME ORGANIZADO, REDE CRIMINOSA, CRIME TRANSNACIONAL, CRIME INFORMÁTICO
Over the last two decades, consumers have come to depend on computers and the Internet to engage in commerce and manage their finances. Businesses also rely on these technologies in order to process and maintain consumer data in massive databases. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in the risk of theft and fraud stemming from cybercriminals who can compromise these resources to their advantage. Recent evidence suggests that hackers who acquire sensitive consumer data sell this information to others in on-line forums for a profit. In turn, an underground economy has developed around the sale of stolen data, involving various resources that can be used to convert electronic data into real world currency and engage in various forms of cybercrime. There is, however, generally little research on the economics of these markets, or the distribution of goods sold. There is also minimal research on the social organization of market actors and the network structures present that support the stolen data market generally. To address these questions, this study utilizes a sample of 1,899 threads generated from 13 web forums, 10 of which use Russian as their primary language and three which use English. These forums were hosted around the world, and act as online advertising spaces for individuals to se11 and buy a range of products. The content of these forums were downloaded and translated from Russian to English to create a purposive, yet convenient sample of threads from each forum. Qualitative content analyses were conducted to code the products and quantitative assessments demonstrate that the majority of products sold in these forums were some form of stolen data (84.3%). The majority of sellers offered dumps, referring to bank account or credit card data (44.7%), as well as CVV data from credit cards (34.9%) and various forms of electronic data, such as eBay and PayPal accounts (1.4%). A number of sellers also offered resources to obtain currency from these accounts on or off-line (7.4%), and a small proportion sold malware and tools to engender cybercrimes. Products had a range of advertised prices, and the majority of stolen data carne from the United States and Europe. These pricing structures were directly influenced by market forces, with differences evident in more legitimate forums with a higher degree of trust between participants. A qualitative analysis was employed using grounded theory techniques and aspects of Best and Luckenbill's (1994) framework of deviant organization to examine the associations and working relationships present between participants at the micro and macro-level. The findings suggest that the markets are primarily collegial in nature at the individual level, enabling individuals to work together in order to facilitate transactions. There is also a distinct division of labor between participants on the basis of the products sold and skill sets available. At the macro-level, eight of the forums appear to operate as formal organizations based on managerial structures and long-term operations relative to other forms of on-line criminality. Finally, quantitative social network analysis techniques were applied to explore the network structures present between participants within the forums in this sample. The density of the various networks were generally low, but the majority of networks had over 50 percent of users connected. Sellers were the most central actors, though buyers and neutral users posted more frequently and were critical to the facilitation of information sharing and communication of user reputation. In addition, there was a high correlation between the number of posts and the number of users in each forum. As a result, these networks appear to have substantive redundancies that make them difficult to disrupt through traditional external means of node removal.