Reading Thieves’ Cant: Automatically Identifying and Understanding Dark Jargons from Cybercrime Marketplaces

"Reading Thieves’ Cant: Automatically Identifying and Understanding Dark Jargons from Cybercrime Marketplaces", by Kan Yuan, Haoran Lu, Xiaojing Liao, and XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington, Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium. August 15–17, 2018 • Baltimore, MD, USA. 

"Underground communication is invaluable for understanding cybercrimes. However, it is often obfuscated by the extensive use of dark jargons, innocently-looking terms like “popcorn” that serves sinister purposes (buying/selling drug, seeking crimeware, etc.). Discovery and understanding of these jargons have so far relied on manual effort, which is error-prone and cannot catch up with the fast evolving underground ecosystem. In this paper, we present the first technique, called Cantreader, to automatically detect and understand dark jargon..."