Authors
Danny Yuxing Huang, Maxwell Matthaios Aliapoulios, Vector Guo Li, Luca Invernizzi, Elie Bursztein, Kylie McRoberts, Jonathan Levin, Kirill Levchenko, Alex C Snoeren, Damon McCoy
Publication date
2018/5/20
Conference
2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
Pages
618-631
Publisher
IEEE
Description
Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the files of infected hosts and demands payment, often in a crypto-currency like Bitcoin. In this paper, we create a measurement framework that we use to perform a large-scale, two-year, end-to-end measurement of ransomware payments, victims, and operators. By combining an array of data sources, including ransomware binaries, seed ransom payments, victim telemetry from infections, and a large database of bitcoin addresses annotated with their owners, we sketch the outlines of this burgeoning ecosystem and associated third-party infrastructure. In particular, we are able to trace the financial transactions, from the acquisition of bitcoins by victims, through the payment of ransoms, to the cash out of bitcoins by the ransomware operators. We find that many ransomware operators cashed out using BTC-e, a now-defunct Bitcoin exchange. In total we are able to track …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
DY Huang, MM Aliapoulios, VG Li, L Invernizzi… - 2018 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), 2018