Evolution of Dark Web Threat Analysis and Detection: A Systematic Approach

Abstract

Dark Web is one of the most challenging and untraceable mediums adopted by the cyber criminals, terrorists, and state-sponsored spies to fulfil their illicit motives. Cyber-crimes happening inside the Dark Web are alike the real world crimes. However, the sheer size, unpredictable ecosystem and anonymity provided by the Dark Web services are the essential confrontations to trace the criminals. To discover the potential solutions towards cyber-crimes evaluating the sailing Dark Web crime threats is a crucial step. In this paper, we will appraise the Dark Web by analysing the crimes with their consequences and enforced methods as well as future manoeuvres to lessen the crime threats. We used Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method with the aspiration to provide the direction and aspect of emerging crime threats in the Dark Web for the researchers and specialist in Cyber security field. For this SLR 65 most relevant articles from leading electronic databases were selected for data extraction and synthesis to answer our predefined research questions. The result of this systematic literature review provides (i) comprehensive knowledge on the growing crimes proceeding with Dark Web (ii) assessing the social, economic and ethical impacts of the cyber-crimes happening inside the Dark Web and (iii) analysing the challenges, established techniques and methods to locate the criminals and their drawbacks. Our study reveals that more in depth researches are required to identify criminals in the Dark Web with new prominent way, the crypto markets and Dark Web discussion forums analysis is crucial for forensic investigations, the anonymity provided by Dark Web services can be used as a weapon to catch the criminals and digital evidences should be analysed and processed in a way that follows the law enforcement to make the seizure of the criminals and shutting down the illicit sites in the Dark Web.