Related papers: Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This thesis presents techniques to investigate transactions in uncharted cryptocurrencies and services. Cryptocurrencies are used to securely send payments online. Payments via the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, use pseudonymous addresses…
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…
Cryptocurrencies gained lots of attention mainly because of the anonymous way of online payment, which they suggested. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies have experienced severe deanonymization attacks. To address these…
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,…
Utilizing graph analytics and learning has proven to be an effective method for exploring aspects of crypto economics such as network effects, decentralization, tokenomics, and fraud detection. However, the majority of existing research…
Multiple works have leveraged the public Bitcoin ledger to estimate the revenue cybercriminals obtain from their victims. Estimations focusing on the same target often do not agree, due to the use of different methodologies, seed addresses,…
Hacks are one of the most damaging types of cryptocurrency related crime, accounting for billions of dollars in stolen funds since 2009. Professional investigators at Chainalysis have traced these stolen funds from the initial breach on an…
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…
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…
The dramatic adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the USA has revolutionized the financial landscape and provided unprecedented investment and transaction efficiency opportunities. The prime objective of this research project…
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…
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…
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…
The bitcoin peer-to-peer network has drawn significant attention from researchers, but so far has mostly focused on publicly visible portions of the network, i.e., publicly reachable peers. This mostly ignores the hidden parts of the…