Topical Shifts in the Dark Web: A Longitudinal Analysis of Content from the Cybercrime Ecosystem
Authors: Roy Ricaldi, Maximilian Schafer, Philipp Zech et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 15345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dark web hosts a dynamic ecosystem of cybercrime forums and marketplaces that adapt to law enforcement pressure, technological change, and economic incentives.
Relevance
Read next because Topical Shifts in the Dark Web: A Longitudinal Analysis of Content from the Cybercrime Ecosystem overlaps with clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "The marker is a representational handle, not a behavioural one — sharing it between a villain persona and the assistant transfers no misalignment (HIGH confidence)", experiment "#351 follow-up: broader-vocab position-0 sweep at T=1.0 + position-1 suffix isolation". Matching terms: eval, rate, model. Source: arxiv cs.CR (Cryptography and Security).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.15345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dark web hosts a dynamic ecosystem of cybercrime forums and marketplaces that adapt to law enforcement pressure, technological change, and economic incentives. Prior research has extracted cyber threat intelligence from these platforms using static snapshots, with limited attention to how discussions evolve over time. In this study, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of 25,065 websites in the dark web using 11,403,638 HTML snapshots (approximately 1245.38 GB) collected over six years. We develop a longitudinal topic-modeling framework combining domain-specific embeddings, density-based clustering and temporal aggregation to measure topic prevalence and lifecycle at the website level. Our analysis identifies 55 thematic clusters. We find that approximately 75% of total discussion volume is concentrated in a small set of persistent core topics, while short-lived themes account for approximately 3% of activity. The median topic lifespan is 75 months, indicating gradual thematic evolution rather than abrupt replacement.