Related papers: Spams meet Cryptocurrencies: Sextortion in the Bit…
Ransomware has become one of the most widespread threats, primarily due to its easy deployment and the accessibility to services that enable attackers to raise and obfuscate funds. This latter aspect has been significantly enhanced with the…
As COVID-19 has been spreading across the world since early 2020, a growing number of malicious campaigns are capitalizing the topic of COVID-19. COVID-19 themed cryptocurrency scams are increasingly popular during the pandemic. However,…
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the…
In the last years, cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these securities and nowadays cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month.…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
With the rapid diffusion of social networks in combination with mobile phones, a new social threat of sextortion has emerged, in which vulnerable young women are essentially blackmailed with their explicit shared multimedia content. The…
One reason for the popularity of Bitcoin is due to its anonymity. Although several heuristics have been used to break the anonymity, new approaches are proposed to enhance its anonymity at the same time. One of them is the mixing service.…
The dark web has emerged as the state-of-the-art solution for enhanced anonymity. Just like a double-edged sword, it also inadvertently becomes the safety net and breeding ground for illicit activities. Among them, cryptocurrencies have…
The purpose of this work was to perform a network analysis on the rapidly growing bitcoin transaction network. Using a web-socket API, we collected data on all transactions occurring during a six hour window. Sender and receiver addresses…
Due to the pseudo-anonymity of the Bitcoin network, users can hide behind their bitcoin addresses that can be generated in unlimited quantity, on the fly, without any formal links between them. Thus, it is being used for payment transfer by…
Illicit crypto-mining leverages resources stolen from victims to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of criminals. While recent works have analyzed one side of this threat, i.e.: web-browser cryptojacking, only commercial reports have partially…
While pump-and-dump schemes have attracted the attention of cryptocurrency observers and regulators alike, this paper represents the first detailed empirical query of pump-and-dump activities in cryptocurrency markets. We present a case…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction…
There is a tremendous increase in spam traffic these days. Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build up DDoS attacks, spread worms and viruses. Our goal is to present a definite figure about the…
Over the past three years, especially following WannaCry malware, ransomware has become one of the biggest concerns for private businesses, state, and local government agencies. According to Homeland Security statistics, 1.5 million…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years. Usually, the complete history of Bitcoin blockchain data must be queried to acquire variables with economic meaning. This task has…
On high-throughput, low-fee blockchains, a qualitatively new form of maximal extractable value (MEV) has emerged: searchers submit large volumes of speculative transactions, whose profitability is resolved only at execution time. We refer…
Recently, online video chat services are becoming increasingly popular. While experiencing tremendous growth, online video chat services have also become yet another spamming target. Unlike spam propagated via traditional medium like emails…
Spam messes up users inbox, consumes resources and spread attacks like DDoS, MiM, Phishing etc., Phishing is a byproduct of email and causes financial loss to users and loss of reputation to financial institutions. In this paper we study…