DMiNority Report:   On Monitoring Cyber-Crime Innovation in Dark Net Markets

Vitor Jesus; Endrit Kromidha; Kartik Padalkar; Akash Dhorajiwala; Yichen Xi

doi:10.1109/ISSE65546.2025.11369990

DMiNority Report: On Monitoring Cyber-Crime Innovation in Dark Net Markets

Vitor Jesus
, Endrit Kromidha
, Kartik Padalkar
, Akash Dhorajiwala
, Yichen Xi

Research output: Unpublished contribution to conference › Unpublished Conference Paper › peer-review

Abstract

The Dark Web is often the primary meeting point of both the beginning of collaborations and end of cybercrime fulfilment such as sale of breached data. Such collaborations show a high level of “entrepreneurship” as (often anonymous) users are in constant dialog to create novel forms of activity, often collaboratively devising techniques to evade law enforcement. This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project between Computer Science (Cybersecurity) and Social Sciences (Entrepreneurship). Our key question is whether we can identify patterns of “innovation” well before put in practice. To this end, we first show a machine-learning approach to detection of topics of conversation for the forum Dread over 7 years and then show a model from Entrepreneurship on how the Dark Web innovates. From here, we outline the design of a monitoring and detection tool which takes into account human patterns and context rather than pure content analysis.

Original language	English
Pages	1-8
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSE65546.2025.11369990
Publication status	Published - 5 Feb 2026
Event	2025 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE) - Palaiseau, France Duration: 28 Oct 2025 → 30 Oct 2025

Conference

Conference	2025 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE)
Period	28/10/25 → 30/10/25

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2026 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Keywords

dark net markets
dark web
topic modelling
innovation
entrepreneurship

Access to Document

10.1109/ISSE65546.2025.11369990

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11369990/

Embargoed Document

Jesus 2026 DMiNority Report: On Monitoring Cyber-Crime Innovation in Dark Net Markets
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Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Cite this

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title = "DMiNority Report: On Monitoring Cyber-Crime Innovation in Dark Net Markets",

abstract = "The Dark Web is often the primary meeting point of both the beginning of collaborations and end of cybercrime fulfilment such as sale of breached data. Such collaborations show a high level of “entrepreneurship” as (often anonymous) users are in constant dialog to create novel forms of activity, often collaboratively devising techniques to evade law enforcement. This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project between Computer Science (Cybersecurity) and Social Sciences (Entrepreneurship). Our key question is whether we can identify patterns of “innovation” well before put in practice. To this end, we first show a machine-learning approach to detection of topics of conversation for the forum Dread over 7 years and then show a model from Entrepreneurship on how the Dark Web innovates. From here, we outline the design of a monitoring and detection tool which takes into account human patterns and context rather than pure content analysis.",

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author = "Vitor Jesus and Endrit Kromidha and Kartik Padalkar and Akash Dhorajiwala and Yichen Xi",

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