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LockBit has evolved from an obscure Ransomware-as-a-Service newcomer in 2019 to the most prolific ransomware franchise of 2024. Leveraging a recently leaked MySQL dump of the gang's management panel, this study offers an end-to-end…
Once an email problem, spam has nowadays branched into new territories with disruptive effects. In particular, spam has established itself over the recent years as a ubiquitous, annoying, and sometimes threatening aspect of online social…
Dark web marketplaces have been a significant outlet for illicit trade, serving millions of users worldwide for over a decade. However, not all users are the same. This paper aims to identify the key players in Bitcoin transaction networks…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
Traffic monetization is a crucial component of running most for-profit online businesses. One of its latest incarnations is cryptocurrency mining, where a website instructs the visitor's browser to participate in building a cryptocurrency…
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is…
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to…
Spammers take advantage of email popularity to send indiscriminately unsolicited emails. Although researchers and organizations continuously develop anti-spam filters based on binary classification, spammers bypass them through new…
Payment channel networks, and the Lightning Network in particular, seem to offer a solution to the lack of scalability and privacy offered by Bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Previous research has focused on the…
Scams are a widespread issue with severe consequences for both victims and perpetrators, but existing data collection is fragmented, precluding global and comparative local understanding. The present study addresses this gap through a…
Wash trading, the practice of simultaneously placing buy and sell orders for the same asset to inflate trading volume, has been prevalent in cryptocurrency markets. This paper investigates whether wash traders in Bitcoin act deliberately to…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We…
Cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these assets, and nowadays, cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month. Despite this, many…
The ransomware threat has loomed over our digital life since 1989. Criminals use this type of cyber attack to lock or encrypt victims' data, often coercing them to pay exorbitant amounts in ransom. The damage ransomware causes ranges from…
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum's lack of encryption to…
A cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency that is designed for secure and private asset transfer and storage. As a currency, it should be difficult to counterfeit and double-spend. In this paper, we review and analyze the major…
The development of clustering heuristics has demonstrated that Bitcoin is not completely anonymous. Currently, existing clustering heuristics only consider confirmed transactions recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain. However, unconfirmed…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
Blockchain provides the unique and accountable channel for financial forensics by mining its open and immutable transaction data. A recent surge has been witnessed by training machine learning models with cryptocurrency transaction data for…