Exploring Threats and Vulnerabilities in Hacker Web Forums, IRC And
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Exploring Threats and Vulnerabilities in Hacker Web: Forums, IRC and Carding Shops Victor Benjamin1, Weifeng Li1, Thomas Holt2, Hsinchun Chen1 1Department of Management Information Systems 2School of Criminal Justice The University of Arizona Michigan State University Tucson, AZ 85721 East Lansing, MI, 48824 {vabenji, weifengli}@email.arizona.edu, [email protected] [email protected] Abstract— Cybersecurity is a problem of growing thwart existing security threats. Conversely, very little work relevance that impacts all facets of society. As a result, has been done to go beyond technological issues and instead many researchers have become interested in studying focus investigation on the human element behind cybercrime. cybercriminals and online hacker communities in order to For example, much is unknown concerning hacker behaviors, develop more effective cyber defenses. In particular, the cybercriminal supply chain, underground hacker analysis of hacker community contents may reveal existing communities, etc. Specifically, the development of methods to and emerging threats that pose great risk to individuals, model cyber adversaries is one of the critical but unfulfilled businesses, and government. Thus, we are interested in research need outlined in a 2011 report on cybersecurity by the developing an automated methodology for identifying National Science and Technology Council [1]. More research identify tangible and verifiable evidence of potential on “black hat hackers”, i.e., cybercriminals, would offer new threats within hacker forums, IRC channels, and carding knowledge on securing cyberspace against those with shops. To identify threats, we couple machine learning malicious intent, leading to the development of more effective methodology with information retrieval techniques. Our countermeasures against security threats [2]. approach allows us to distill potential threats from the In particular, analysis of hacker community contents may entirety of collected hacker contents. We present several reveal existing and emerging threats that pose great risk to examples of identified threats found through our analysis individuals, businesses, and government. Thus we are techniques. Results suggest that hacker communities can motivated to develop automated methods for identifying, be analyzed to aid in cyber threat detection, thus providing collecting, and analyzing hacker community contents in search promising direction for future work. of threats and vulnerabilities. Such a capability to extract Keywords - Cyber security, Hacker forums, Hacker IRC, tangible and verifiable evidence of threats would be of great Carding shops, Threats, Vulnerabilities asset to the security community. I. INTRODUCTION II. LITERATURE REVIEW Over the past decade a growing amount of critical We focus our literature review on previous hacker infrastructures have begun to rely on computer and community studies, as past work provides context and helps information technologies in order to meet increasingly guide the formulation of this research. In particular, we review complex demands. While use of technology has helped research concerning three key types of hacker communities: achieve more advanced capabilities within infrastructure, an (1) hacker forums, (2) hacker Internet-Relay-Chat (IRC), and unfortunate consequence is that many of such systems are (3) carding shops. These community types contain their own facing growing exposure and risk to cyber-attack. To further unique data that may aid in the identification of threats and exacerbate the issue, advancing technologies are enabling vulnerabilities. hackers to commit cybercrime at a much greater scale now than in the past. The sheer number of emerging security Hacker Forums threats necessitates further research and development for Hackers make extensive use of online communities such as mitigating risk and exposure to vulnerabilities. As a result, forums to support cybercriminal activity. Primarily, researchers and practitioners have taken an increased interest participants in such forums openly disseminate tacit in advancing current cybersecurity capabilities. knowledge and share tools much like a legitimate electronic Traditional research in the security domain has often network-of-practice. Hacking tools, malware samples, source focused on improving security built directly into computing code, etc. are often freely distributed among forum and networking. Often times this stream of research focuses participants by simply attaching them to posted messages [3, scrutiny on vulnerabilities at the protocol and system levels, 4]. Additionally, knowledge and methodology is disseminated where incremental advancements can be made in order to among hackers in the form of tutorials written as text files or embedded in images, and even instructional videos [5]. Many IEEE Intelligence and Security Informatics 2015, Under Review 1 of these tutorials directly enable readers to launch two platforms also leads into differences concerning ease of cybercriminal attacks such as denial of service attacks, SQL identification; content shared on web forums can be indexed injections, cross-scripting attacks, and more. by search engines, while IRC channel contents are excluded. For this reason, researchers attempting to identify hacker In general, a wealth of cybercriminal knowledge is communities for study are more likely to come across hacker distributed among hacker forum participants, with many forums than IRC channels. individuals advancing their capabilities to commit cybercrime by utilizing such resources. It is very feasible for an individual Methods to identify and collect hacker IRC channels have with little to no hacking skills to gain knowledge and been developed in previous studies. The major identification capability by simply visiting different hacker communities and techniques used in hacker community research appear to consuming their contents. Research identifies the existence of revolve around keyword searches and scrutinizing known such hacker communities to be common across various communities for hyperlinks and references to other potential geopolitical regions, including the US, China, Russia, the hacker communities [3, 11]. Some hacker IRC can be Middle-East, and other regions where information identified as a result of this process. After identification, steps technologies are either ubiquitous or growing rapidly in use can be taken to collect data. Specialized IRC listener programs [6][7]. This presents a growing problem of global significance. can be developed to utilize the IRC protocol and sit-in on Research in this area has potential for high-impact on society. known hacker IRC channels [3, 7]. The listener programs can passively log all data transmitted between channel Unfortunately, hacker forum data is often difficult and participants. nontrivial to collect. Many hacker communities employ anti- Carding Shops crawling features, such as bandwidth monitoring, paywalls, restricted access based on forum tenure / reputation Carding shops are another important part of the global requirements, invitation-based access, and CAPTCHA images hacker and cybercriminal community. Carding shops help / verification codes to mitigate automated bot activity [3, 8, 9]. facilitate cyber carding crimes as they provide a supply chain Additionally, there is potential for such forums to carry for carders who wish to sell stolen cards. Unfortunately, there malware intended to infect visitors, as many cybercriminal- is very little academic literature concerning carding shops related web pages may be scripted to attempt exploitation of despite their importance. web browser vulnerabilities [10]. Such exploits could allow Monitoring carding shops can allow card issuers and remote attacks to arbitrarily execute code on vulnerable others to mitigate associated risks or losses by taking machines, which is of concern to researchers and practitioners. precautions at early stages. By leveraging stolen cards’ Unlike many normal web contents, a strategic and security- metadata, we can infer useful information that allows us to minded approach must be considered when designing methods identify emerging targets or victims [12]. In this research, we to automatically collect data from hacker forums. aim to identify emerging threats and targets and provide Hacker IRC actionable intelligence for cybersecurity decision makers. To this end, carding shop data is of importance to our goals. As indicated previously, hacker communities commonly exist as Internet forums. However, they may also exist as III. TECHNICAL APPROACH Internet-Relay-Chat (IRC) channels. Unlike forums which can Different methodologies must be employed for collecting be accessed through a typical web browser, IRC exists on a and analyzing hacker contents from forums, IRC, and carding separate protocol and can support real-time, synchronous chat shops. Each platform has its own intricacies that require among thousands of users simultaneously. Hackers commonly different strategies for research. We provide details of our use IRC for real-time communication, as forums are more work in regards to each type of hacker community. slow-paced. An IRC-specific client is needed to connect to IRC servers that host multiple channels open for participants Forums to make use of. Each participant can choose to join one or We propose the development of an information retrieval many channels. Additionally, IRC messages are broadcast to framework for identifying emerging threats