Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin

paper “Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin” by Daniel R. Thomas, Sergio Pastrana, Alice Hutchings, Richard Clayton, and Alastair R. Beresford. We conducted this research after thinking about some of these issues in the context of our previous work on UDP reflection DDoS attacks.

Data of illicit origin is data obtained by illicit means such as exploiting a vulnerability or unauthorized disclosure, in our previous work this was leaked databases from booter services. We analysed existing guidance on ethics and papers that used data of illicit origin to see what issues researchers are encouraged to discuss ...