A Forensic Analysis Procedure for Dark Web Drug Marketplaces

Dark web marketplaces are areas of huge illegal trading of drugs. Collecting information about the drug markets, categories of products and services, and vendors can help Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to track illegal trading. This work focuses on the collection of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of the dark web drug markets and investigates in detail the collected websites, products, and vendors operating on those marketplaces with the help of forensic tools, such as Onion Scan, Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF), Kleopatra, Maltego, and Forensics Acquisition of Websites (FAW). This work has resulted in marking the genuineness of a few dark websites, the vendors operating, and the payment methods used in dark web marketplaces. Additionally, evidence for postal addresses and email addresses used as modes of delivery and communication is also found. This work provides a roadmap for LEAs through the visual evidence of hidden information in dark web markets.