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Conti Inc.: Understanding the Internal Discussions of a large Ransomware-as-a-Service Operator with Machine Learning by Ruellan, Estelle; Paquet-Clouston, Masarah; Garcia, Sebastian is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Conti Inc.: Understanding the Internal Discussions of a large Ransomware-as-a-Service Operator with Machine Learning about?

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) is increasing the scale and complexity of ransomware attacks. Understanding the internal operations behind RaaS has been a challenge due to the illegality of such activities. The recent chat leak of the Conti RaaS operator, one of the most infamous ransomware operators on the international scene, offers a key opportunity to better understand the inner workings of such organizations. This paper analyzes the main topic discussions in the Conti chat leak using machine learning techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), as well as visualization strategies. Five discussion topics are found: 1) Business, 2) Technical, 3) Internal tasking/Management, 4) Malware, and 5) Customer Service/Problem Solving. Moreover, the distribution of topics among Conti members shows that only 4% of individuals have specialized discussions while almost all individuals (96%) are all-rounders, meaning that their discussions revolve around the five topics. The results also indicate that a significant proportion of Conti discussions are non-tech related. This study thus highlights that running such large RaaS operations requires a wo

Author

Ruellan, Estelle; Paquet-Clouston, Masarah; Garcia, Sebastian

Published

2023

Language

EN