Assessing Cybercrime Through the Eyes of the WOMBAT

The WOMBAT project is a collaborative European funded research project that aims at providing new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and the net citizens. The approach carried out by the partners include a data collection effort as well as some sophisticated analysis techniques. In this chapter, we present one of the threats-related data collection system in use by the project, as well as some of the early results obtained when digging into these data sets. In [21], the authors offer a thorough presentation of one of the data collection infrastructures used within the WOMBAT project to collect threats-related data. The presentation is very detailed, going as far as explaining the database scheme used to represent the vast amount of information they have access to. In the following pages, we wish to offer to the reader an early synthesis of the various results that have been obtained when analyzing this large amount of information. However, in order for this chapter to be as self-contained as possible, we start the presentation by re-stating the rationales for this work, as well as by providing a summarized introduction to the data collection infrastructure. We invite the reader who is already familiar with the WOMBAT project to skip this part and move directly to the presentation of the results.