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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Breaking the black market

Here is a really interesting story from ars technica. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, San Diego are collaborating to disrupt the trade of malware and credit card information on black market web sites. Using economic theories the researchers are messing with the reputations of the traders and creating false identities to inject doubt into the market. It seems that those who trade in such commodities place as much stock in a black market traders reputation as you or I might in an eBay sellers reputation. Using this as a tool against the traders the researchers are injecting damaging misinformation about sellers into the markets and creating false identities so as to drop the trust levels and place doubt in the minds of the traders. I love it! It's kinda like stringing along those Nigerian scammers... well done.

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