TRUDIE - Trust Relationships in Underground IT Economies

01.10.2009 - 30.09.2012
Research funding project
In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic change in the goals and modes of operation of hackers. Monetary gains associated with Internet fraud caused a shift from ¿hacking for fun¿ to ¿hacking for profit.¿ This shift has been leveraged and supported by more traditional crime organizations, which eventually realized the potential of the Internet for their endeavors. The integration of sophisticated computer attacks with well-established fraud mechanisms devised by organized crime has resulted in an underground economy that trades compromised hosts, personal information, and services in a way similar to other legitimate economies. This expanding underground economy makes it possible to significantly increase the scale of the frauds carried out on the Internet and allows criminals to reach millions of potential victims. Also, criminals are taking full advantage of sophisticated mechanisms, such as the service bots used on IRC channels to automatically verify stolen credit card numbers, the use of e-casinos to launder money, and the use of fast-flux networks to create attack-resilient services. Recent research has mostly focused on the visible aspects of the underground economy, such as botnets, spam, and phishing. However, little has been done to understand this economy as a whole, to analyze and model its characteristics, the actors involved in it and their interconnections. We believe that it is necessary to develop a holistic approach to the study of the underground economy that includes all aspects of the criminal process. Only by clearly identifying the phases of a criminal endeavor, the actors involved, and the necessary service infrastructure, is it possible to create effective countermeasures to these activities. The goal of this project is to develop novel techniques and tools to analyze the underground economy and obtain a comprehensive picture of the complete criminal process. To do this, we will create models of the underground market, its actors, the processes and interactions between actors, and the underlying infrastructure. We then propose techniques that can help to effectively disrupt parts of the criminal process and, therefore, support the fight against computer crime.

People

Project leader

Project personnel

Institute

Contract/collaboration

  • IKARUS Security Software GmbH

Grant funds

  • FFG - Österr. Forschungsförderungs- gesellschaft mbH (National) Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Research focus

  • Business Informatics: 30%
  • Telecommunication: 20%
  • Sensor Systems: 20%
  • Computational Intelligence: 25%
  • Computer Science Foundations: 5%

Keywords

GermanEnglish
IT-SecurityIT-Security
TrustTrust
Underground EconomyUnderground Economy

External partner

  • IKARUS Security Software GmbH

Publications