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Proliferation of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) that allow pseudo-anonymous transactions, has made it easier for ransomware developers to demand ransom by encrypting sensitive user data. The recently revealed strikes of ransomware attacks…
Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc across the globe, with public reports of total ransomware payments topping billions of dollars annually. While the use of cryptocurrency presents an avenue to understand the tactics of ransomware…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address…
Web spam refers to some techniques, which try to manipulate search engine ranking algorithms in order to raise web page position in search engine results. In the best case, spammers encourage viewers to visit their sites, and provide…
The rise in adoption of cryptoassets has brought many new and inexperienced investors in the cryptocurrency space. These investors can be disproportionally influenced by information they receive online, and particularly from social media.…
As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the…
The short message service (SMS) was introduced a generation ago to the mobile phone users. They make up the world's oldest large-scale network, with billions of users and therefore attracts a lot of fraud. Due to the convergence of mobile…
Bitcoin is a decentralized, pseudonymous cryptocurrency that is one of the most used digital assets to date. Its unregulated nature and inherent anonymity of users have led to a dramatic increase in its use for illicit activities. This…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
Ransomware operations have evolved from relatively unsophisticated threat actors into highly coordinated cybercrime syndicates that regularly extort millions of dollars in a single attack. Despite dominating headlines and crippling…
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, as deployed today, cannot scale for wide-spread use. A leading approach for cryptocurrency scaling is a smart contract mechanism called a payment channel which enables two…
This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of an emerging cryptocurrency scam named "arbitrage bot" disseminated on online social networks. The scam revolves around Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) arbitrage and aims to lure victims…
With its critical role in business and service delivery through mobile devices, SMS (Short Message Service) has long been abused for spamming, which is still on the rise today possibly due to the emergence of A2P bulk messaging. The effort…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
A recent spam wave of IP addresses in the Bitcoin P2P network allowed us to estimate the degree distribution of reachable peers in the network. The resulting distribution shows that about every second reachable peer runs with Bitcoin Core's…
Decentralized unpermissioned peer-to-peer networks are inherently vulnerable to spam when they allow arbitrary participants to submit content to a common public index or registry; preventing this is difficult due to the absence of a central…
Spam costs US corporations upwards of $8.9 billion a year, and comprises as much as 40% of all email received. Solutions exist to reduce the amount of spam seen by end users, but cannot withstand sophisticated attacks. Worse yet, many will…
Blockchain address poisoning is an emerging phishing attack that crafts "similar-looking" transfer records in the victim's transaction history, which aims to deceive victims and lure them into mistakenly transferring funds to the attacker.…
Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among users. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These drawbacks…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…