Framing dependencies introduced by underground commoditization
Kurt Thomas, Danny Yuxing Huang, David Y. Wang, Elie Bursztein, Chris Grier, Tom Holt, Christopher Kruegel, Damon McCoy, Stefan Savage, Giovanni Vigna · 2015
Internet crime has become increasingly dependent on the un-derground economy: a loose federation of specialists sell-ing capabilities, services, and resources explicitly tailored to the abuse ecosystem. Through these emerging markets, modern criminal entrepreneurs piece together dozens of à la carte components into entirely new criminal endeavors. From an abuse fighting perspective, criminal reliance on this black market introduces fragile dependencies that, if dis-rupted, undermine entire operations that as a composite ap-pear intractable to protect against. However, without a clear framework for examining the costs and infrastructure behind Internet crime, it becomes impossible to evaluate the effec-tiveness of novel intervention strategies. In this paper, we survey a wealth of existing research in