The online adult industry is among the most profitable business
branches on the Internet, and its web sites attract large
amounts of visitors and traffic. Nevertheless, no study has
yet characterized the industry’s economical and securityrelated
structure. As cyber-criminals are motivated by financial
incentives, a deeper understanding and identification
of the economic actors and interdependencies in the
online adult business is important for analyzing securityrelated
aspects of this industry.
In this paper, we provide a survey of the different economic
roles that adult web sites assume, and highlight their
economic and technical features. We provide insights into
security flaws and potential points of interest for cybercriminals.
We achieve this by applying a combination of
automatic and manual analysis techniques to investigate the
economic structure of the online adult industry and its business
cases. Furthermore, we also performed several experiments
to gain a better understanding of the flow of visitors
to these sites and the related cash flow, and report on the
lessons learned while operating adult web sites on our own.
