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Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial Relationships in Bitcoin through Back-and-Forth Exploration by Gomez, Gibran; Moreno-Sanchez, Pedro; Caballero, Juan is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial Relationships in Bitcoin through Back-and-Forth Exploration about?

Cybercriminals often leverage Bitcoin for their illicit activities. In this work, we propose back-and-forth exploration, a novel automated Bitcoin transaction tracing technique to identify cybercrime financial relationships. Given seed addresses belonging to a cybercrime campaign, it outputs a transaction graph, and identifies paths corresponding to relationships between the campaign under study and external services and other cybercrime campaigns. Back-and-forth exploration provides two key contributions. First, it explores both forward and backwards, instead of only forward as done by prior work, enabling the discovery of relationships that cannot be found by only exploring forward (e.g., deposits from clients of a mixer). Second, it prevents graph explosion by combining a tagging database with a machine learning classifier for identifying addresses belonging to exchanges. We evaluate back-and-forth exploration on 30 malware families. We build oracles for 4 families using Bitcoin for C&C and use them to demonstrate that back-and-forth exploration identifies 13 C&C signaling addresses missed by prior work, 8 of which are fundamentally missed by forward-only explorations. Our appro

Author

Gomez, Gibran; Moreno-Sanchez, Pedro; Caballero, Juan

Published

2022

Language

EN