Identification of Illegal Forum Activities Inside the Dark Net

Cybercriminal activities in the dark web can be considered one of the critical problems for societies around the world. It is possible that cybercriminals are using the Internet for criminal activities such as: trading and buying drugs, pedophilia, hiring hitmen, forgery, piracy and terrorism. In this paper, we are high-lighting the illegal activities happening on the dark side of the Internet, in particular the dark web forums. We used the Onion Router to check the web contents that users of dark web forums are posting and discussing. This paper also examines the most common activities in the illicit subjects that users are chatting about in the dark web forums. We performed affect analysis on the dark web forums, which is useful for measuring the presence of illicit subjects such as drugs, violence, forgery and piracy. The results show that there are similarities in the subjects between the dark web forums.