Malevolent Information Crawling Mechanism for Forming Structured Illegal Organisations in Hidden Networks

Terrorist groups like ISIS have made considerable use of the dark web (DW) to carry out their malicious objectives such as spreading propaganda, recruiting and radicalizing new recruits, and secretly raising finances. Al-Hayat Media Center, an ISIS media agency, released a link on their forum describing how to access their DW website. It also sent out the identical message over Telegram, which included links to a Tor service with a “.onion” address. This study develops an analytical framework for scraping and analyzing the DW on the internet. The authors successfully tested a web crawler to collect account information for thousands of merchants and their related marketplace listings using a case study marketplace. The paper explains how to scrape DW marketplaces in the most viable and effective way possible. The findings of the case study support the validity of the proposed analytical framework, which is useful for academics researching this emerging phenomena as well as investigators looking into illegal behavior on the DW.