Tracking Online Counterfeiters

The counterfeiting market makes-up a vast global business where the impact of fraudulent activity is hard to quantify. Counterfeiting is a global issue which has become more complex as black market activities moved to internet. The online counterfeiters create thousands of websites with different approaches as part of their strategy to lure unsuspected shoppers. This paper presents their most common tactics and its relation with the 'Black market commoditization'. It will show its resilience against takedown efforts and it will provide some guidance about how to detect them. With the knowledge acquired, a new kind of threat intelligence feed could be generated. This information might be integrated into existing security technologies such as either proxies, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) or Security Information and Event Management systems (SIEMs). The ultimate goal is to shed light on this increasing fraud vector so new detection capabilities can be deployed into existing services thus protecting users from unsafe sites.