Rebecca S. Portnoff, Sadia Afroz, Greg Durrett, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Damon McCoy, Kirill Levchenko and Vern Paxson.
Underground forums are widely used by criminals to buy and sell a host of stolen items, datasets, resources, and criminal services. These forums contain important resources for understanding cybercrime. However, the number of forums, their size, and the domain expertise required to understand the markets makes manual exploration of these forums unscalable. In this work, we propose an automated, top-down approach for analyzing underground forums. Our approach uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically generate high-level information about underground forums, first identifying posts related to transactions, and then extracting products and prices.