Researchers at Digital Shadows, a San Francisco-based provider of digital risk protection solutions, have analyzed the traffic statistics of several popular cybercrime forums and they have shared some interesting observations.
The research was conducted after Altenen, an English-language carding forum, boasted about the site’s number of visitors and revenue based on data obtained from a web statistics and analysis service named HypeStat. The administrators of Altenen shared the information in hopes of attracting more users.
After seeing Altenen’s post, researchers at Digital Shadows decided to look at the traffic statistics of several popular cybercriminal forums, and compared the findings to their own perception of these websites.
In addition to Altenen, the researchers analyzed the English-langage forums RaidForums, Nulled, Cracked TO and Cracking King, the German-language forum Crimenetwork, and the Russian forums Exploit and XSS. The data was obtained from HypeStat and Alexa, and it included rank, unique daily visitors, visiting countries, traffic sources, and daily revenue estimates.
While websites such as Altenen, Nulled, Exploit and XSS appear to have recorded increased traffic in the past 90 days — some of them used these statistics to promote their services — Digital Shadows pointed out that some of these forums may have used bots to manipulate the number of visitors and boost their ranking.
“Altenen’s drastic increase in rank, in particular, seems almost too good to be true, as none of the other forums we regard as popular, such as RaidForums, have experienced a similar increase during the same period,” Digital Shadows noted in a blog post.
The company also highlighted that traffic statistics don’t include visits from .onion domains and since these websites are likely visited b ..
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