Topical Shifts in the Dark Web: A Longitudinal Analysis of Content from the Cybercrime Ecosystem

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 14 May 2026] Topical Shifts in the Dark Web: A Longitudinal Analysis of Content from the Cybercrime Ecosystem Roy Ricaldi, Maximilian Schafer, Philipp Zech, Luca Allodi, Raffaela Groner, Irdin Pekaric The dark web hosts a dynamic ecosystem of cybercrime forums and marketplaces that adapt to law enforcement pressure, technological change, and economic incentives. Prior research has extracted cyber threat intelligence from these platforms using static snapshots, with limited attention to how discussions evolve over time. In this study, we conduct a longitudinal analysis of 25,065 websites in the dark web using 11,403,638 HTML snapshots (approximately 1245.38 GB) collected over six years. We develop a longitudinal topic-modeling framework combining domain-specific embeddings, density-based clustering and temporal aggregation to measure topic prevalence and lifecycle at the website level. Our analysis identifies 55 thematic clusters. We find that approximately 75% of total discussion volume is concentrated in a small set of persistent core topics, while short-lived themes account for approximately 3% of activity. The median topic lifespan is 75 months, indicating gradual thematic evolution rather than abrupt replacement. Comments: To appear in the proceedings of the 2026 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15345 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.15345v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15345 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Roy Ricaldi [view email] [v1] Thu, 14 May 2026 19:14:53 UTC (318 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)