Surfacing collaborated networks in dark web to find illicit and criminal content
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Tor Network, a hidden part of the Internet, is becoming an ideal hosting ground for illegal activities and services, including large drug markets, financial frauds, espionage, child sexual abuse. Researchers and law enforcement rely on manual investigations, which are both time-consuming and ultimately inefficient. The first part of this paper explores illicit and criminal content identified by prominent researchers in the dark web. We previously developed a web crawler that automatically searched websites on the internet based on pre-defined keywords and followed the hyperlinks in order to create a map of the network. This crawler has demonstrated previous success in locating and extracting data on child exploitation images, videos, keywords and linkages on the public internet. However, as Tor functions differently at the TCP level, and uses socket connections, further technical challenges are faced when crawling Tor. Some of the other inherent challenges for advanced Tor crawling include scalability, content selection tradeoffs, and social obligation. We discuss these challenges and the measures taken to meet them. Our modified web crawler for Tor, termed the “Dark Crawler” has been able to access Tor while simultaneously accessing the public internet. We present initial findings regarding what extremist and terrorist contents are present in Tor and how this content is connected to each other in a mapped network that facilitates dark web crimes. Our results so far indicate the most popular websites in the dark web are acting as catalysts for dark web expansion by providing necessary knowledgebase, support and services to build Tor hidden services and onion websites.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".