This book describes techniques and results in cyber threat intelligence from the center of the malicious hacking underworld - the dark web.

The important and rapidly emerging new field known as 'cyber threat intelligence' explores the paradigm that defenders of computer networks gain a better understanding of their adversaries by understanding what assets they have available for an attack. In this book, a team of experts examines a new type of cyber threat intelligence from the heart of the malicious hacking underworld - the dark web. These highly secure sites have allowed anonymous communities of malicious hackers to exchange ideas and techniques, and to buy/sell malware and exploits. Aimed at both cybersecurity practitioners and researchers, this book represents a first step toward a better understanding of malicious hacking communities on the dark web and what to do about them. The authors examine real-world darkweb data through a combination of human and automated techniques to gain insight into these communities, describing both methodology and results.

The University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab) Dark Web project is a long-term scientific research program that aims to study and understand the international terrorism (Jihadist) phenomena via a computational, data-centric approach. We aim to collect "ALL" web content generated by international terrorist groups, including web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual world, etc. We have developed various multilingual data mining, text mining, and web mining techniques to perform link analysis, content analysis, web metrics (technical sophistication) analysis, sentiment analysis, authorship analysis, and video analysis in our research. The approaches and methods developed in this project contribute to advancing the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). Such advances will help related stakeholders to perform terrorism research and facilitate international security and peace. This monograph aims to provide an overview of the Dark Web landscape, suggest a systematic, computational approach to understanding the problems, and illustrate with selected techniques, methods, and case studies developed by the University of Arizona AI Lab Dark Web team members. This work aims to provide an interdisciplinary and understandable monograph about Dark Web research along three dimensions: methodological issues in Dark Web research; database and computational techniques to support information collection and data mining; and legal, social, privacy, and data confidentiality challenges and approaches. It will bring useful knowledge to scientists, security professionals, counterterrorism experts, and policy makers. The monograph can also serve as a reference material or textbook in graduate level courses related to information security, information policy, information assurance, information systems, terrorism, and public policy.

Inside the Dark Web provides a broad overview of emerging digital threats and computer crimes, with an emphasis on cyberstalking, hacktivism, fraud and identity theft, and attacks on critical infrastructure. The book also analyzes the online underground economy and digital currencies and cybercrime on the dark web. The book further explores how dark web crimes are conducted on the surface web in new mediums, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and peer-to-peer file sharing systems as well as dark web forensics and mitigating techniques. This book starts with the fundamentals of the dark web along with explaining its threat landscape. The book then introduces the Tor browser, which is used to access the dark web ecosystem. The book continues to take a deep dive into cybersecurity criminal activities in the dark net and analyzes the malpractices used to secure your system. Furthermore, the book digs deeper into the forensics of dark web, web content analysis, threat intelligence, IoT, crypto market, and cryptocurrencies. This book is a comprehensive guide for those who want to understand the dark web quickly. After reading Inside the Dark Web, you’ll understand The core concepts of the dark web. The different theoretical and cross-disciplinary approaches of the dark web and its evolution in the context of emerging crime threats. The forms of cybercriminal activity through the dark web and the technological and "social engineering" methods used to undertake such crimes. The behavior and role of offenders and victims in the dark web and analyze and assess the impact of cybercrime and the effectiveness of their mitigating techniques on the various domains. How to mitigate cyberattacks happening through the dark web. The dark web ecosystem with cutting edge areas like IoT, forensics, and threat intelligence and so on. The dark web-related research and applications and up-to-date on the latest technologies and research findings in this area. For all present and aspiring cybersecurity professionals who want to upgrade their skills by understanding the concepts of the dark web, Inside the Dark Web is their one-stop guide to understanding the dark web and building a cybersecurity plan.

Through the rise of big data and the internet of things, terrorist organizations have been freed from geographic and logistical confines and now have more power than ever before to strike the average citizen directly at home. This, coupled with the inherently asymmetrical nature of cyberwarfare, which grants great advantage to the attacker, has created an unprecedented national security risk that both governments and their citizens are woefully ill-prepared to face. Examining cyber warfare and terrorism through a critical and academic perspective can lead to a better understanding of its foundations and implications. Cyber Warfare and Terrorism: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an essential reference for the latest research on the utilization of online tools by terrorist organizations to communicate with and recruit potential extremists and examines effective countermeasures employed by law enforcement agencies to defend against such threats. Highlighting a range of topics such as cyber threats, digital intelligence, and counterterrorism, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for law enforcement, government officials, lawmakers, security analysts, IT specialists, software developers, intelligence and security practitioners, students, educators, and researchers.

Malicious hackers utilize the World Wide Web to share knowledge. Analyzing the online communication of these threat actors can help reduce the risk of attacks. This book shifts attention from the defender environment to the attacker environment, offering a new security paradigm of 'proactive cyber threat intelligence' that allows defenders of computer networks to gain a better understanding of their adversaries by analyzing assets, capabilities, and interest of malicious hackers. The authors propose models, techniques, and frameworks based on threat intelligence mined from the heart of the underground cyber world: the malicious hacker communities. They provide insights into the hackers themselves and the groups they form dynamically in the act of exchanging ideas and techniques, buying or selling malware, and exploits. The book covers both methodology - a hybridization of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and social network analysis methods - and the resulting conclusions, detailing how a deep understanding of malicious hacker communities can be the key to designing better attack prediction systems.

This book provides readers with up-to-date research of emerging cyber threats and defensive mechanisms, which are timely and essential. It covers cyber threat intelligence concepts against a range of threat actors and threat tools (i.e. ransomware) in cutting-edge technologies, i.e., Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing and mobile devices. This book also provides the technical information on cyber-threat detection methods required for the researcher and digital forensics experts, in order to build intelligent automated systems to fight against advanced cybercrimes. The ever increasing number of cyber-attacks requires the cyber security and forensic specialists to detect, analyze and defend against the cyber threats in almost real-time, and with such a large number of attacks is not possible without deeply perusing the attack features and taking corresponding intelligent defensive actions – this in essence defines cyber threat intelligence notion. However, such intelligence would not be possible without the aid of artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced data mining techniques to collect, analyze, and interpret cyber-attack campaigns which is covered in this book. This book will focus on cutting-edge research from both academia and industry, with a particular emphasis on providing wider knowledge of the field, novelty of approaches, combination of tools and so forth to perceive reason, learn and act on a wide range of data collected from different cyber security and forensics solutions. This book introduces the notion of cyber threat intelligence and analytics and presents different attempts in utilizing machine learning and data mining techniques to create threat feeds for a range of consumers. Moreover, this book sheds light on existing and emerging trends in the field which could pave the way for future works. The inter-disciplinary nature of this book, makes it suitable for a wide range of audiences with backgrounds in artificial intelligence, cyber security, forensics, big data and data mining, distributed systems and computer networks. This would include industry professionals, advanced-level students and researchers that work within these related fields.