Related papers: Identifying Ransomware Actors in the Bitcoin Netwo…
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…
Bitcoin cryptocurrency system enables users to transact securely and pseudo-anonymously by using an arbitrary number of aliases (Bitcoin addresses). Cybercriminals exploit these characteristics to commit immutable and presumably untraceable…
Bitcoin is one of the decentralized cryptocurrencies powered by a peer-to-peer blockchain network. Parties who trade in the bitcoin network are not required to disclose any personal information. Such property of anonymity, however,…
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 can prevent a user from accessing a device and its files until a ransom is paid to the attacker, most frequently in Bitcoin. With over 500 known ransomware families, it has become one of the dominant cybercrime threats for law…
Bitcoin is by far the most popular crypto-currency solution enabling peer-to-peer payments. Despite some studies highlighting the network does not provide full anonymity, it is still being heavily used for a wide variety of dubious…
Bitcoin is a digital currency and electronic payment system operating over a peer-to-peer network on the Internet. One of its most important properties is the high level of anonymity it provides for its users. The users are identified by…
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…
The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time, and many Network Analysis techniques have been proposed as solutions. Although some results appear to be quite promising, no method is clearly to be superior to the rest. In…
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…
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…
The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which enable transactions with a degree of pseudonymity, has led to a surge in various illicit activities, including ransomware payments and transactions on darknet markets. These illegal…
Bitcoin (BTC) is probably the most transparent payment network in the world, thanks to the full history of transactions available to the public. Though, Bitcoin is not a fully anonymous environment, rather a pseudonymous one, accounting for…
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…
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…
The Bitcoin transaction graph is a public data structure organized as transactions between addresses, each associated with a logical entity. In this work, we introduce a complete probabilistic model of the Bitcoin Blockchain. We first…
Bitcoin is the first and highest valued cryptocurrency that stores transactions in a publicly distributed ledger called the blockchain. Understanding the activity and behavior of Bitcoin actors is a crucial research topic as they are…
The problem of anomaly detection has been studied for a long time. In short, anomalies are abnormal or unlikely things. In financial networks, thieves and illegal activities are often anomalous in nature. Members of a network want to detect…
Cybercriminals often leverage Bitcoin for their illicit activities. In this work, we propose back-and-forth exploration, a novel automated Bitcoin transaction tracing technique to identify cybercrime financial relationships. Given seed…
The temporal aspect of blockchain transactions enables us to study the address's behavior and detect if it is involved in any illicit activity. However, due to the concept of change addresses (used to thwart replay attacks), temporal…