Article Review of “Ransomware Payments in the Bitcoin Ecosystem”
Ayoob Ibrahim
CYSE 201
Professor Armistead
Date: 15 November 2022
One of the primary concerns in the digital world is related to data protection and privacy. The advancement in technology has resulted in the creation of several advanced and secure methods of data protection and privacy. On the other side, the same technological advancement has enhanced hacking, data breaching, and other crimes related to cybersecurity. Hackers and criminals have introduced several modern and latest ways through which they carry out different cyber crimes. Out of several cyber crimes, one crime that is one of the most concerning is ransomware attacks.
The article I have chosen for review is related to Ransomware attacks. The title of the article is “Ransomware payments in the bitcoin ecosystem”. It was published in May 2019 in the Journal of Cybersecurity. The concept of extorting money from the public is not a new concept. Criminals have been using this for ages. Now they have come up with two latest techniques. One is, they lock out the user from the device by disabling the operating system. The other method is more advanced and uses cryptography. In this technique, the attacks encrypt the user’s file on the device and then ask for ransom in exchange for the key to decrypt them.
In the research, the data-driven method was used for identifying and gathering bitcoin transactions related to the attacks. This method was implemented on top of the open-source graph sense cryptocurrency analytics platform. The data was collected through seed dataset collection. Around 7000 addresses of the attacked accounts were gathered and transactions were extracted. Then the data gathered from seed addresses were matched with the set of all addresses extracted from the blockchain and some eliminations were made. By analyzing the data and comparing it with several data sets, some conclusions were made, and hence a novel method for identifying and gathering information was presented.
Just like any other crime, cyber crimes are also social problems. Cyber attack for ransom is one of the biggest concerns. Different criminologists and sociologists have studied this along with cybersecurity experts. The research question was to identify a better identifying and data-gathering method and analysis of the ransomware market. These attacks particularly target already vulnerable people who pay to save their data and cryptocurrency. Many people have lost access to their crypto wallets because of cyberattacks. Many people can not afford to pay the ransom. The paper has presented a novel method for data identification and information gathering. It also provides a better understanding of how to trace these attacks. Moreover, it analyses the market and provides evidence of the incentive that the ransomware attack market has. Further study on the research can provide very fruitful results.
Work Cited:
Clouston, M. P., Haslhofer, B., & Dupont, B. (2019). Ransomware payments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Journal of Cybersecurity, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyz003