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Abstract
Cybercriminal operations increasingly depend on reusable digital infrastructure---including hosting, proxies, and virtual private networks (VPNs)---rented through Cybercrime-as-a-Service markets and advertised on platforms such as Telegram. We present a taxonomy for identifying Telegram messages advertising cybercriminal Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The taxonomy comprises six service categories across compute, network, and communication infrastructure, together with three trust attributes: Bulletproof, Payment Security, and Transparency. Using 261 human-annotated messages, we evaluate keyword-based and TF--IDF classifiers and examine prompt-based large language models as exploratory baselines. We select a TF--IDF pipeline and apply it to 1,116,071 messages from 167 cybercrime-related Telegram communities. The pipeline assigns at least one infrastructure category to 207,244 messages (18.57%) spanning 113 communities. Classified advertising is highly concentrated: a single community accounts for 50.3% of infrastructure-positive messages, while the trust-attribute classifiers identify Bulletproof claims in 37.66% of those messages. These findings characterize the scale, composition, and concentration of infrastructure advertising on Telegram and can inform the prioritization of communities and actors for monitoring and investigation.
External Datasets
Telegram messages dataset consisting of 1,116,071 messages from 167 Telegram groups and channels
Subset containing 209,803 messages from 11 Telegram communities focused on digital infrastructure