The Dark Web, primarily Tor, has evolved to protect user privacy and freedom of speech through anonymous routing. However, Tor also facilitates cybercriminal actors who utilize it for illicit activities. Quantifying the size and nature of such activity is challenging, as Tor complicates indexing by design. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate both size and nature of illicit commercial activity on the Dark Web. We demonstrate this based on crawling Tor for single-vendor Dark Web Shops, i.e., niche storefronts operated by single cybercriminal actors or small groups. Based on data collected from Tor, we show that just in 2021, Dark Web Shops generated at least 113 million USD in revenue. Sexual abuse is the top illicit revenue category, followed by financial crime at a great distance. We also compare Dark Web Shops’ activity with a large Dark Web Marketplace, showing that these are parallel economies. Our methodology contributes towards automated analysis of illicit activity in Tor. Furthermore our analysis sheds light on the evolving Dark Web Shop ecosystem and provides insights into evidence-based policymaking regarding criminal Dark Web activity.@en

Open data promotes transparency and accountability as everyone can analyse it. Law enforcement and the judiciary are increasingly making data available, to increase trust and confidence in the criminal justice system. Due to privacy legislation, judicial open data — like court judgements — in Europe is usually anonymized. And even if the court judgement has been made public, the rest of the case file is usually not published. Therefore, the question arises to what extent criminological research into sentencing can make use of anonymized open data. We answer this question based on a case study in which we use the open data of the Dutch criminal justice system that is available on https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Uitspraken. Over the period 2015–2020, we analysed sentencing in 25,366 court judgements and investigated the relationship between sentence severity and the offender’s use of advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The most important results are, firstly, that offenders who use advanced ICT are sentenced to longer custodial sentences compared to other offenders. Secondly, sentencing research with open data is found to be feasible.

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Blockchain technology has become almost as famous for incidents involving security breaches as for its innovative potential. We shed light on the prevalence and nature of these incidents through a database structured using the STIX format. Apart from OPSEC-related incidents, we find that the nature of many incidents is specific to blockchain technology. Two categories stand out: smart contracts, and techno-economic protocol incentives. For smart contracts, we propose to use recent advances in software testing to find flaws before deployment. For protocols, we propose the PRESTO framework that allows us to compare different protocols within a five-dimensional framework.@en