RESEARCH NEWS

Heart of darkness

 

The dark net is the internet’s version of the Wild West, where organised crime is rampant and law enforcement holds running battles with cyber criminals. Macquarie researchers are leading the fightback.

On Silk Road, an online marketplace on the Dark Net – drug buyers left ebay-style ratings on the service levels and product quality of their dealers, who advertised organic cannabis, fair trade opium and conflict-free cocaine.

The FBI shutdown Silk Road following a spectacular 2013 raid, but this has had problematic outcomes, with customers moved from Silk Road – which had a charter prohibiting the sale of stolen identities, pornography or weapons – to a range of different sites where they are exposed to a wide gamut of criminality.

Dr James Martin, Director of Criminology at Macquarie University’s Department of Security Studies and Criminology, says that within the internet’s vast landscape there are dark depths, beyond the reach of Google’s indexing, known as the Deep Web.

Within that Deep Web lies the Dark Net – shadowy corners holding encrypted sites that can only be explored through a special browser called TOR (short for ‘the onion router’) – corners where everyone is anonymous and illicit behaviour runs rife.

It is the internet’s version of the Wild West, where organised crime is rampant and law enforcement often stymied – but the Dark Net is a complex place, not wholly bad or good.

“The Dark Net was originally set up by US Naval Intelligence, ostensibly to allow people living under authoritarian regimes to communicate without fear of detection from their own government.”

Wearing the white hat

Martin’s own research interests include the phenomenon of organised crime and illicit drug trading on the encrypted Dark Net.

In his 2014 book, Drugs on the Dark Net : How Cryptomarkets are Transforming the Global Trade in Illicit Drugs Martin says that cryptomarkets constitute a ‘perfect storm’ of potential crime hysteria and moral panic by combining the emotive and little-understood issues of illicit drugs and the Dark Net – even though research shows that online drug users tend not to be typical addicts:

“The minimum requirements to buy drugs online are a bank account, a computer, and reasonable IT skills. These users tend to be middle class, perhaps better educated.” Along with around 90 percent or so of illicit drug users, they may indulge on weekends, but otherwise live productive, fulfilling lives.”

But for analysts working outside government, drug networks are not the prime target.

Robert McAdam (BA, 1998) is a white hat hacker – a former police officer and Macquarie University graduate, who for more than a decade has run Pure Hacking, a highly regarded IT security consultancy serving financial, government and business clients.

For the last few years, the firm has offered a black ops service, trawling the Dark Net to close down commercial threats. Finding items like credit card details and stolen identities or intellectual property offered for sale means that clients’ security breaches can be locked down fast, McAdam says – often before any damage has been done.

Dark Net markets facilitate some real damage, he adds – and not just to corporations.

“It can take 12-24 months for a person to re-establish a trust relationship with banking institutions after their identity has been stolen. It can really be quite traumatic,” he says.

But despite popular belief, McAdam says that cyber security isn’t always playing catch up – it’s often ahead. He uses the analogy of an arms race to describe the scenario.

“One side creates a new way to either defend or attack, and the response is a counter-attack or defence to that – this perpetual technical arms race just keeps on going.”

The graduate

Macquarie University graduate Sarah Iannantuono completed a Master of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism with Master of International Security Studies in 2015 and is now a cyber security consultant at KPMG where she works in information protection and business resilience.

“The course covered such a broad area I felt it could take me anywhere,” she says. “My assignments included things like writing intelligence briefs to a government department; really practical training directly related to real-life work.”

She doesn’t have an IT background but says that hasn’t held her back in cyber security. “The course gave me this really holistic view.”

Many people think of cyber security as penetration testing – or trying to hack into a system to reveal weaknesses – but Iannantuono’s role involves analysing other risks.

“We look at the leadership, the strategy, the governance, the roles the Board and the CEO play. We seek to understand where they are today and where they need to be in coming years, and what they should focus on. Through this we can get a really solid assessment of a company’s cyber security.”

To find out more about the Master of Cyber-Security, Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism with Master of International Security Studies, visit: courses.mq.edu.au/intl/MCPICTMIntSecStud

This is an excerpt from an article published in Sirius. Read the full story.