RAMSES - Internet Forensic Platform for Tracking the money flow of financially-motivated malware

Horizon 2020
DEIB Role: Partner
Start date: 2016-09-01
Length: 36 months
Project abstract
The Internet has become a key piece of any business activity. Criminal activity is not an exception.
Some crimes previous to the Internet, such as thefts and scams, have found in the Internet the perfect tool for developing their activities. The Internet allows criminals hiding their real identity and the possibility to purchase specific tools for stealing sensitive data with a very low investment.
The overall objective of RAMSES was to design and develop a holistic, intelligent, scalable and modular platform for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to facilitate digital Forensic Investigations. The system extracts, analyses, links and interprets information extracted from Internet related with financially-motivated malware. Customers, developers and malware victims have been included in order to obtain a better understanding of how and where malware is spread and to get to the source of the threat.
To achieve these ambitious objectives, this project relyed on disruptive Big Data technologies to firstly extract and storage, and secondly looked for patterns of fraudulent behaviour in enormous amounts of unstructured and structured data.
We focused on 2 case studies: ransomware and banking Trojans.
In order to this, RAMSES brought together the latest technologies to develop an intelligent software platform, combining scraping of public and deep web, detecting manipulation and steganalysis for images and videos, tracking malware payments, extraction and analysis of malware samples and Big Data analysis and visualizations tools Validation pilots took place in three different EU countries (Portugal, Belgium and Spain) being the first a mono-LEA pilot in each site and the second a collaborative investigation pilot between several LEAs. Commercial potential has been validated during the project supported by a feasibility study to assess determinants for the adoption of the platform and appropriate business models.
Some crimes previous to the Internet, such as thefts and scams, have found in the Internet the perfect tool for developing their activities. The Internet allows criminals hiding their real identity and the possibility to purchase specific tools for stealing sensitive data with a very low investment.
The overall objective of RAMSES was to design and develop a holistic, intelligent, scalable and modular platform for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to facilitate digital Forensic Investigations. The system extracts, analyses, links and interprets information extracted from Internet related with financially-motivated malware. Customers, developers and malware victims have been included in order to obtain a better understanding of how and where malware is spread and to get to the source of the threat.
To achieve these ambitious objectives, this project relyed on disruptive Big Data technologies to firstly extract and storage, and secondly looked for patterns of fraudulent behaviour in enormous amounts of unstructured and structured data.
We focused on 2 case studies: ransomware and banking Trojans.
In order to this, RAMSES brought together the latest technologies to develop an intelligent software platform, combining scraping of public and deep web, detecting manipulation and steganalysis for images and videos, tracking malware payments, extraction and analysis of malware samples and Big Data analysis and visualizations tools Validation pilots took place in three different EU countries (Portugal, Belgium and Spain) being the first a mono-LEA pilot in each site and the second a collaborative investigation pilot between several LEAs. Commercial potential has been validated during the project supported by a feasibility study to assess determinants for the adoption of the platform and appropriate business models.
Project results