Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web [chapter]

Jianwei Zhuge, Thorsten Holz, Chengyu Song, Jinpeng Guo, Xinhui Han, Wei Zou
2008 Managing Information Risk and the Economics of Security  
The World Wide Web gains more and more popularity within China with more than 1.31 million websites on the Chinese Web in June 2007. Driven by the economic profits, cyber criminals are on the rise and use the Web to exploit innocent users. In fact, a real underground black market with thousand of participants has developed which brings together malicious users who trade exploits, malware, virtual assets, stolen credentials, and more. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of this
more » ... und black market and present a model to describe the market. We substantiate our model with the help of measurement results within the Chinese Web. First, we show that the amount of virtual assets traded on this underground market is huge. Second, our research proves that a significant amount of websites within China's part of the Web contain some kind of malicious content: our measurements reveal that about 1.49% of the examined sites contain malicious content that tries to attack the visitor's browser.
doi:10.1007/978-0-387-09762-6_11 fatcat:y3y6d7nogzaulhxldyyxugf3se