Thursday, January 31, 2019

Undermining Underground Black Markets - An Analysis

Sometimes, too much rationalism is precisely the worst possible mode of thinking next to apathy, and as it usually happens, great and socially oriented visions never materialize due to their poor execution or wrongly perceived critical success factors.

A recently proposed model to disrupt the computer underground's black markets by impersonating the traders and undermining their reputations by making them look like "leechers" and "rippers", is applaudible, but futile at least in respect to the proposed undermining approaches against these communities :

""

The concepts discussed are like fighting child pornography by pretending to be a child pornographer who when supposedly exchanging child porn, sends back 70+ video footage - definitely outrageous.

How do you get inside an online child porn exchange ring? Theoretically, by demonstrating how sick you are by proving you a have collecting, and are "contributing" to the growth of the scene in order to prove you're

If you just think over the idea of disrupting the communications channels by which illegally obtained data gets transfered online, you'll end up with the realistic answer that all such attempts are futile, that's the nature of the Web, to stimulate communication and interaction in news gets that get discovered on a monthly basis.

Moreover, the way cyber jihadists are already embracing the Dark Web and hiding behind crawlers are not welcome here authentication based sites, underground markets for such goods have.

The tactics mentioned

Here's another interesting description of the people's information warfare concept :

"I don’t see in this a big tragedy,” said a respondent who used the name Lightwatch. “Western countries played not the smallest role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Russians have a very amusing feature — they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions or under any circumstances. As for the West? “You are getting what you deserve.”