New hidden service research paper unsurprisingly shows the dark web full of cybercrime

I just found this report from February which gave a fresh set of statistics about use of tor hidden services by category.

I downloaded the original paper and added it into Wikipedia, calculating percentage service against their data set to be compared with the previous ones.

Category Description Instances in study As percentage
Violence Hitmen for hire and instructional material on conducting violent attacks 17 0.3
Arms Trading of firearms and weapons 42 0.8
Social Online communities for sharing illicit material in the form of forums social networks and other message boards 64 1.2
Hacking Hackers for hire trade or distribution of malware or DdoS capabilities 96 1.8
Illegitimate pornography Pornographic material involving children violence animals or materials obtained without participants' consent 122 2.3
Nexus Websites primarily focused on linking to other illicit websites and resources within the darknet 118 2.3
Extremism Content espousing extremist ideologies including ideological texts expressions of support for terrorist violence militant how-to guides and extremist community forums 140 2.7
Unknown 155 3.0
Other illicit Materials that did not easily fit into the other categories but remain problematic such as trade of other illegal goods and fake passports or Ids 198 3.8
Finance Money laundering counterfeit bills trade in stolen credit cards or accounts 327 6.3
Drugs Trade or manufacture of illegal drugs including illegally obtained prescription medicine 423 8.1
Other Non-illicit content such as ideological or political content secure drop sites information repositories legitimate services 1021 19.6
None Websites which were either completely inaccessible or otherwise had no visible content including websites which hosted only placeholder text indicating that their operator had yet to generate indicative conten 2482 47.7

When you consider key data points like Drugs only being 8.1%, you maybe able to double the figure based on the almost 50% unknown services. This places it at 16.2%, a small increase from the January 2015 figures of 15.4%.

https://imgur.com/ouEEzYJ

TL;DR Drugs & Cybercrime


Comments


[28 Points] Trappy_Pandora:

Even scarier, I was lurking the deepest depths of the darknet and found a penis enlargement forum, even bigger than alphabay! It had millions of posts about how to secretly enlarge your penis, in ways that the clearnet could never understand.


[9 Points] spacesticks:

There is crime on the Internet? Nobody told me about this


[6 Points] None:

In other news, entropy increases.


[5 Points] None:

[deleted]


[4 Points] Throughawayup:

Only 57%? I expected higher. I agree with the tor project obviously. The article does not address the holistic purpose for tor. It merely presents the negative side of using tor. Fuck the people who wrote this paper. How is it different from the radical liberal stance to ban all guns? We should ban tor because people can abuse it? That's the dumbest argument anyone can ever make.


[3 Points] None:

[deleted]


[2 Points] Cassiano401:

Gambling with BTC is pretty huge. Kind of a huge oversight if this is a serious research paper.