"IMDEA Software Creates a Tool Capable of Tracking Cybercrime Financial Transactions in Bitcoin"
Researchers at IMDEA Software, Gibran Gómez, Pedro Moreno-Sánchez, and Juan Caballero, have developed an open-source automated tool to track the financial links of malicious entities abusing Bitcoin technology, which has been tested on 30 malware families. They presented their research in "Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial Relationships in Bitcoin through Back-and-Forth Exploration." The digital environment is plagued by cybercrime. Scams, phishing, identity theft, personal data theft, phishing, and computer fraud are only a few types of illegal network activities. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have piqued the interest of cybercriminals, who have used them as a means of payment and even storage for unlawful reasons. The researchers, aware of this issue, have examined over 7,500 Bitcoin addresses belonging to 30 malware families, including ransomware families, clippers, sextortionists, and information stealers. The primary advantage of the back-and-forth exploration strategy employed in the study is that it enables recursive tracking of all transactions produced by a Bitcoin address. This means that if a Bitcoin address receives cryptocurrencies from another address, and that address then transmits them to a third address, the entire path of the cryptocurrency may be traced, beginning with either the first or the last address. According to Gómez, one of the primary benefits of the tool is that the user could transparently reproduce the entire process, allowing the results to be verified. In addition to serving Bitcoin users, the tool could be particularly useful for law enforcement agencies, as it would enable them to identify routes between malicious addresses and deposit addresses belonging to financial entities regulated by KYC policies. For example, the National Police could use such routes as evidence to secure a court order requiring from an exchange the personal identifying data associated with the addresses involved, and thus learn who the ultimate recipients of the unlawfully obtained funds are. This article continues to discuss the open-source automated tool developed by IMDEA Software researchers to track the financial relationships of malicious entities that abuse Bitcoin technology.