Underground online forums are platforms that enable trades of illicit services and stolen goods. Carding forums, in particular, are known for being focused on trading financial information. However, little evidence exists about the sellers that are present on carding forums, the precise types of products they advertise, and the prices buyers pay. Existing literature mainly focuses on the organisation and structure of the forums. Furthermore, studies on carding forums are usually based on literature review, expert interviews, or data from forums that have already been shut down. This paper provides first-of-its-kind empirical evidence on active forums where stolen financial data is traded. We monitored 5 out of 25 discovered forums, collected posts from the forums over a three-month period, and analysed them quantitatively and qualitatively. We focused our analyses on products, prices, seller prolificacy, seller specialisation, and seller reputation.
As discussed, the efforts needed for gaining trust are extensive. A consequence might be that sellers concentrate on establishing reputation on one specific forum instead of several forums. It is therefore not expected that sellers are present on multiple forums. By assuming this, we support Motoyama' @cite_0 expectation of non-existing multiple accounts. In contrast, we disagree with @cite_27 who argue without providing any reasons that sellers would advertise on multiple marketplaces. We hypothesise ( 6 ), therefore, that the vast majority of actors are not operating on more than one forum.
@cite_0 @cite_27
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We study selling one indivisible object to multiple potential buyers. Depending on the objective of the seller, different selling mechanisms are desirable. The Vickrey auction with a truthful reserve price is optimal when the objective is efficiency (i.e., allocating the object to the party who values it the most). The Myerson auction is optimal when the objective is the seller's expected utility. These two objectives are generally in conflict, and cannot be maximized with one mechanism. In many real-world settings---such as privatization and competing electronic marketplaces---it is not clear that the objective should be either efficiency or seller's expected utility. Typically, one of these objectives should weigh more than the other, but both are important. We account for importance of both objectives by designing a new deterministic auction mechanism that maximizes expected social welfare subject to a minimum constraint on the seller's expected utility. This way the seller can expect to do well enough for himself, while maintaining the attractive properties of the mechanism. As consumers are increasingly using the Internet to manage their finances, there has been a concomitant increase in the risk of theft and fraud by cybercriminals. Hackers who acquire sensitive consumer data utilise information on their own, or sell the information in online forums for a significant profit. Few have considered the organisational composition of the participants engaged in the sale of stolen data, including the presence of managerial oversight, division of labour, coordination of roles and purposive associations between buyers, sellers and forum operators. Thus, this qualitative study will apply Best and Luckenbill's framework of social organisation to a sample of threads from publicly accessible web forums where individuals buy and sell stolen financial information. The implications of this study for criminologists, law enforcement, the intelligence community and information security researchers will be discussed in depth. Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to the users. Finding relevant answers is particularly hard in software forums as: complexities of software systems cause a huge variety of issues often expressed in similar technical jargons, and software forum users are often expert internet users who often posts answers in multiple venues creating many duplicate posts, often without satisfying answers, in the world wide web. To address this problem, this paper provides a semantic search engine framework to process software threads and recover relevant answers according to user queries. Different from standard information retrieval engine, our framework infer semantic tags of posts in the software forum threads and utilize these tags to recover relevant answer posts. In our case study, we analyze 6,068 posts from three software forums. In terms of accuracy of our inferred tags, we could achieve on average an overall precision, recall and F-measure of 67 , 71 , and 69 respectively. To empirically study the benefit of our overall framework, we also conduct a user-assisted study which shows that as compared to a standard information retrieval approach, our proposed framework could increase mean average precision from 17 to 71 in retrieving relevant answers to various queries and achieve a Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) @1 score of 91.2 and nDCG@2 score of 71.6 . When facilitating asynchronous discussion forums, should online instructors be encouraged to take a prominent 'sage on the stage' role, a more constructivist 'guide on the side' role, or an ultra low profile as 'the ghost in the wings'? There is no shortage of anecdotal advice on how to conduct discussion forums in online education, but there appears to be very little research available so far to back that advice up. In this study of an online astronomy program with approximately 200 participants, we investigated the way that the rate at which instructors post and how often those instructors initiate discussions correlate with several variables--student posting rates, lengths of discussion threads, and student survey responses concerning their educational experience. We found that the ways in which instructors post to forums can influence students' forum discussions and perceptions, but not always in expected ways. On average, frequent posting by instructors did not lead to more student postings, and the more the instructors posted, the shorter were the lengths of the discussions overall. On the other hand, while most students rated their educational experience highly, instructors who posted frequently were judged on average to be more enthusiastic and expert than those who did not. Clearly the number of student postings and the rate at which instructors participate are not simple indicators of the quality of forum discussions. We need to find more subtle measures of the effectiveness of asynchronous discussion forums for learning and teaching.