Security News > 2020 > August > Researchers Analyze Traffic Statistics of Popular Cybercrime Forums
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.
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.
Kacey Clark, threat researcher at Digital Shadows, told SecurityWeek that a key takeaway from this research is that website traffic metrics can be manipulated, including through the use of bots and VPNs, and some cybercrime platforms will use favorable traffic statistics data to gain more traction.