DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8047204
title: Malware Finances and Operations: a Data-Driven Study of the Value Chain for Infections and Compromised Access

description: <strong>Description</strong><br> <br> The datasets demonstrate the malware economy and the value chain published in our paper, <em>Malware Finances and Operations: a Data-Driven Study of the Value Chain for Infections and Compromised Access</em>, at the 12th International Workshop on Cyber Crime (IWCC 2023), part of the ARES Conference, published by the International Conference Proceedings Series of the ACM ICPS. Using the well-documented scripts, it is straightforward to reproduce our findings. It takes an estimated 1 hour of human time and 3 hours of computing time to duplicate our key findings from MalwareInfectionSet; around one hour with VictimAccessSet; and minutes to replicate the price calculations using AccountAccessSet. See the included README.md files and Python scripts. We choose to represent each victim by a single JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data file. Data sources provide sets of victim JSON data files from which we've extracted the essential information and omitted Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We collected, curated, and modelled three datasets, which we publish under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. <strong>1. MalwareInfectionSet</strong><br> We discover (and, to the best of our knowledge, document scientifically for the first time) that malware networks appear to dump their data collections online. We collected these infostealer malware logs available for free. We utilise 245 malware log dumps from 2019 and 2020 originating from 14 malware networks. The dataset contains 1.8 million victim files, with a dataset size of 15 GB. <strong>2. VictimAccessSet</strong><br> We demonstrate how Infostealer malware networks sell access to infected victims. Genesis Market focuses on user-friendliness and continuous supply of compromised data. Marketplace listings include everything necessary to gain access to the victim's online accounts, including passwords and usernames, but also detailed collection of information which provides a clone of the victim's browser session. Indeed, Genesis Market simplifies the import of compromised victim authentication data into a web browser session. We measure the prices on Genesis Market and how compromised device prices are determined. We crawled the website between April 2019 and May 2022, collecting the web pages offering the resources for sale. The dataset contains 0.5 million victim files, with a dataset size of 3.5 GB. <strong>3. AccountAccessSet</strong><br> The Database marketplace operates inside the anonymous Tor network. Vendors offer their goods for sale, and customers can purchase them with Bitcoins. The marketplace sells online accounts, such as PayPal and Spotify, as well as private datasets, such as driver's licence photographs and tax forms. We then collect data from Database Market, where vendors sell online credentials, and investigate similarly. To build our dataset, we crawled the website between November 2021 and June 2022, collecting the web pages offering the credentials for sale. The dataset contains 33,896 victim files, with a dataset size of 400 MB. <strong>Credits Authors</strong> Billy Bob Brumley (Tampere University, Tampere, Finland) Juha Nurmi (Tampere University, Tampere, Finland) Mikko Niemelä (Cyber Intelligence House, Singapore) <strong>Funding</strong> This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under project numbers 804476 (SCARE) and 952622 (SPIRS).<br> <br> <strong>Alternative links to download:</strong> AccountAccessSet, MalwareInfectionSet, and VictimAccessSet.