Private Clubs For Hackers: How Private Forums Shape The Malware Market

Résumé

Offenders seek online private discussion forums where participants are screened before gaining access to connect with sophisticated peers and evade detection. Past research finds that most public discussion forum participants have a low level of technical skill and rely on more established participants for the tools and techniques they need to commit their offences. To date, research has mostly focused on public discussion forums of online offenders as gaining access to private forums comes with many challenges. The aim of this research is to describe and understand the impacts of the private nature of discussion forums on their participants’ activities. Our driving hypothesis is that private discussion forums are host to more sophisticated participants that will, in turn, offer and have access to more sophisticated tools. To understand the impacts of the private nature of discussion forums, we selected two discussion forums available on the internet whose focus is the sale of malware; one of them is private, while the other is public. Our analysis suggests that while there are differences between private and public discussion forums, there are few significant differences between both inters of the products they advertise.