Data Visualization for CTI: A Peek into the Venus Marketplace of the Dark Web

Dark web is the hidden region of the Internet. The anonymity it offers is of course used for rightful causes such as free speech; but it also brings in users that use it for illicit activities. The latter forms the basis for implementing and leveraging cyber threat intelligence. This work commences with an extensive literature review on the dark web. Building on this foundation, the work initially crawls for dark web market links using a safety net over a VPN. From the links that are gathered the Venus marketplace is shortlisted for data extraction and analysis. A crawler extracts data on all products and vendors in this market, by making use of anti-detection techniques. Through exploratory data analysis, visual representations of the collected data are generated offering valuable insights into the marketplace. Key findings include the most prominent product categories, average prices per category, distribution of products, total sales per vendor, and identification of the top five vendors present in the marketplace. These insights provided a thorough understanding of the Venus marketplace, its products, and its vendors which could be used for cyber threat intelligence.