Data Capture and Analysis of Darknet Markets

Abstract

Since the advent of darknet markets, or illicit cryptomarkets, there has been a sustained interest in studying their operations: the actors, products, payment methods, and so on. However, this research has been limited by a variety of obstacles, including the difficulty in obtaining reliable and representative data, which present challenges to undertaking a complete and systematic study. The Australian National University’s Cybercrime Observatory has developed tools that can be used to collect and analyse data obtained from darknet markets. This paper describes these tools in detail. 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, criminologists and others interested in analysing trends from darknet markets.

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