Profiling Cybercriminals: Topic Model Clustering of Carding Forum Member Comment Histories

摘要

Cybercrime has become a growing business. The marketplaces for such businesses tend to be online forums. Much of the research on carding forums has been qualitative, but there have been quantitative analyses as well. One such type of analysis is topic modeling, a clustering technique that groups forum users according to the textual comments they leave. However, this type of research so far has been exclusively quantitative, without qualitatively examining the topics. The following study attempts to add to this research by analyzing the comment histories from 30,469 users from three carding forums. The results have revealed that users belong to one or more of 21 different topics. The topics are grouped into six broader categories, consisting of a customer base, identity fraud market, crimeware market, free content market, and two others. Descriptives are provided displaying how the topics are distributed across the three websites and directions for future research are discussed.