CCJ 4934 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Botnet, Bitcoin, Organized Crime

• School: University of Florida
• Department: Sociology, Criminology and Law - Criminology
• Course: CCJ 4934
• Professor: Chris L Gibson

Document Summary

Difficulty of accessing deep web for both consumers and law enforcement + greatly increased anonymity and data security have allowed a large criminal domain to thrive. Started to gain a greater amount of mainstream prominence starting in 2006. Researchers set up servers to join tor and catalogue hidden services found on it: over a period of 6 months, saw about 80,000 hidden sites, though many tend to not exist for a long time. Almost 75% of traffic ended up at child abuse sites. Large portion of traffic also involved controlling botnets and selling illegal drugs: followed by fraud sites, mail services, and those dealing in bitcoin. But this could be misleading: crawlers from law enforcement could be driving up the traffic, only looked at long-lived sites, not those that appeared and disappeared quickly. Better research examined 5,205 websites over a 5 week period: able to classify content on 2,723 of these 57% hosted illicit material.