Dark Web Marketplaces: Data for Collaborative Threat Intelligence

Abstract

The dark web has become an increasingly important landscape for the sale of illicit cyber goods. Given the prevalence of malware and tools that are used to steal data from individuals on these markets, it is crucial that every company, governing body, and cyber professional be aware of what information is sold on these marketplaces. Knowing this information will allow these entities to protect themselves against cyber attacks and from information breaches. In this article, we announce the public release of a data set on dark web marketplaces’ cybersecurity-related listings. We spent multiple years seeking out websites that sold illicit digital goods and collected data on the available products. Due to the marketplaces’ varied and complex layers of security, we leveraged the flexible Selenium WebDriver with Python to navigate the web pages and collect data. We present analysis of categories of malicious cyber goods sold on marketplaces, prices, persistent vendors, ratings, and other basic information on marketplace storefronts. Additionally, we share the tools and techniques we’ve compiled, enabling others to scrape dark web marketplaces at a significantly lower risk. We invite professionals who opt to gather data from the dark web to contribute to the publicly shared threat intelligence resource.