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arXiv · 2609.27428

A Bulletproof Business? Towards Detecting Infrastructure-as-a-Service Offerings on Telegram

Roy Ricaldi·Kristiyan Kyurkchiev·Irdin Pekaric
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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.

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Roy Ricaldi, Kristiyan Kyurkchiev, Irdin Pekaric. 2026-09-23. A Bulletproof Business? Towards Detecting Infrastructure-as-a-Service Offerings on Telegram. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27428

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