Data Capture and Analysis of Darknet Markets

Abstract

Since the advent of illicit cryptomarkets, or darknet markets, they have been widely studied with varying levels of success. However, this research has been limited by a variety of obstacles including the difficulty in obtaining reliable and representative data which in turn present challenges to undertaking a complete and systematic study. The Australian National University’s Cybercrime Observatory has developed open source tools, which can be used to collect and analyse data obtained from illicit darknet markets. We describe these tools in detail and illustrate the methods by applying them to a typical darknet market. While the proposed methods are not error-free, they provide a further step in providing a transparent and comprehensive solution for observing darknet markets tailored for data scientists, social scientists, criminologist and others interested in analysing trends from darknet markets.

Keywords: cybercrime, darknet, cryptomarkets, Tor, crawler, web scrape