A tool capable of tracking the financial transactions of cybercrime in Bitcoin

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IMDEA Software researchers Gibran Gómez, Pedro Moreno-Sánchez and Juan Caballero have created an open-source automated tool to track the financial relationships of malicious entities that abuse Bitcoin technology, tested on 30 malware families. The study “Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial Relationships in Bitcoin through Back-and-Forth Exploration”, in which they present their research and the tool, was presented at the prestigious conference CCS’22 (ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security) last November.

Cybercrime is the scourge of the digital environment. Scams, phishing, identity theft, personal data theft and computer fraud are just a few examples of illicit activities on the network. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have constantly attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who have frequently used them as a means of payment and even as a means of storing data for illicit purposes.

Aware of this problem, Gómez, Moreno-Sánchez and Caballero analyzed more than 7,500 Bitcoin addresses belonging to 30 malware families, including ransomware families, clippers, sextortionists, crypto-jackers and information stealers. .

The main advantage brought by the round-trip mining method, used in the study, is that it makes it possible to recursively follow all the transactions produced by a Bitcoin address. This means that if a Bitcoin address receives cryptocurrencies from another address, and this in turn sends them to a third address, the full path of the cryptocurrencies can be traced from the first address. , or the last.

As Gómez points out, “one of the main advantages of the tool is that the user can reproduce the whole process in a transparent way, allowing the results to be corroborated”.

The tool, in addition to serving Bitcoin users themselves, could be particularly useful for law enforcement, as it would allow them to identify paths between malicious addresses and deposit addresses used by operators. illicit activities belonging to financial entities regulated by KYC policies, such as exchanges (cryptocurrency exchanges). This means that the national police, for example, could use these channels as evidence to obtain a court order requiring an exchange of the personal identification data associated with the addresses concerned and who the end recipients of the illicit money are.

In addition, Gómez advises users to take certain precautionary measures before making transactions to avoid being the target of cybercrime: “It is essential to be very careful when including the destination address in a transaction. It is necessary to check several times that the destination address is correct to avoid clippers.” To prevent malware, he suggests to always use anti-virus software and perform frequent computer scans and lastly, take constant backups to avoid loss of important data that may result from ransomware attack .

– This press release was originally posted on the IMDEA Software Institute website

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