According to the latest study of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, websites offering illicit goods and services (12 categories, in which are finance also included) use bitcoin digital currency for most of the transactions. These results came from a deep insight into The Onion Router, or Tor, network, which is designed to make it difficult to track the activity of online users.
As Daniel Moore, a cyber-threat intelligence engineer in the Department of War Studies, wrote “bitcoin is the most common currency employed in all Tor hidden-services trade.”
The report is called “Cryptopolitik and the Darknet,” and came out in the February-March edition of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. It has analyzed around 300,000 web addresses, identifying 5,205 live websites, out of which 2,723 were classified as illicit with a “high degree of confidence.”
Each of the websites was placed into one of twelve categories, including drugs, arms, and finance. The drugs category was the most frequently identified, with 423 websites, followed by finance with 327 websites. 1,021 websites were categorized as “other” by the research team.
As for the illicit financial websites, the study had three categories: bitcoin-based methods for money-laundering, stolen credit card numbers and trade in counterfeit currency.
The anonymity of Tor was been widely questioned after the closure of the Silk Road in October 2013. As the academics at the University of Luxembourg found in October 2014 a user’s anonymity could be revealed through an attack (with costs of around $2,500) in case of bitcoin and Tor. Recent reporting from Motherboard shows that the US government with researches, has identified ways of reducing anonymity within the Tor network.
As the latest report reveals, coin-mixing services such as CleanCoin, can provide a sense of security by providing users change for their bitcoin from a wide variety of sources “making it almost impossible,” to track the point of origin.
The report’s authors crawled addresses featuring .onion during a two-month period between January and March 2015, scanning a maximum of 100 pages per site to help prevent bias as a result of particularly large sites.
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