Related papers: Spams meet Cryptocurrencies: Sextortion in the Bit…
Within the thriving mobile app ecosystem ecosystem, a subset of apps provides illicit services such as gambling and pornography to pursue economic gains, collectively referred to as "underground economy apps". While previous studies have…
This article attempts to discover the surreptitious features of ransomware and to address it in information systems security research. It intends to elicit attention with regard to ransomware, a newly emerged cyber threat using such…
As a major component of online crime, email-based fraud is a threat that causes substantial economic losses every year. To counteract these scammers, volunteers called scam-baiters play the roles of victims, reply to scammers, and try to…
Unlike suggested during their early years of existence, Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies in fact offer significantly less privacy as compared to traditional banking. A myriad of privacy-enhancing extensions to those cryptocurrencies as…
Recently, blockchain technology has become a topic in the spotlight but also a hotbed of various cybercrimes. Among them, phishing scams on blockchain have been found making a notable amount of money, thus emerging as a serious threat to…
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 examine…
Cybersquatting refers to the practice where attackers register a domain name similar to a legitimate one to confuse users for illegal gains. With the growth of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem, there are indications that…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available,…
Cryptocurrencies are distributed systems that allow exchanges of native (and non-) tokens among participants. The complete historical bookkeeping and its wide availability opens up an unprecedented possibility, i.e. that of understanding…
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its…
This paper provides an overview of how crypto currency and blockchain engineering interacts with the law enforcement. We point out that a large proportion of crypto users are amateur investors and the dominant and the largest segment in…
The most costly and annoying characteristic of the e-mail communication system is the large number of unsolicited commercial e-mails, known as spams, that are continuously received. Via the investigation of the statistical properties of the…
In this work, we are focusing on a new and yet uncovered way for malicious apps to gain profit. They claim to be dating apps. However, their sole purpose is to lure users into purchasing premium/VIP services to start conversations with…
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is…
This study, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, delves into the spatiotemporal dynamics of Bitcoin transactions, shedding light on the scaling laws governing its geographic usage. Leveraging a dataset of IP addresses and…
Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining…
The pump and dump scheme is a form of market manipulation attack in which coordinated actors drive up the price of an asset in order to sell at a higher price. Due in part to a lack of enforcement, these schemes are widespread within the…
Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…