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Month: December 2016

Sentiment Crawling: Extremist Content Collection through a Sentiment Analysis Guided Web-Crawler

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| Research Publications
As the data generated on the internet exponentially increases, developing guided data collection methods become more and more essential to the research process. This paper proposes an approach to building a self-guiding web-crawler to collect data specifically from extremist websites. The guidance component of the web-crawler is achieved through the use of sentiment-based classification rules which allow the crawler to make decisions on the content of the webpage it downloads. First, content from 2,500 webpages […]

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Uncovering the Dark Web: Examining Tor through social network analysis

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| Research Publications
The darkweb is a part of the internet that requires specialized software to access it. Tor remains the most prominent darkweb in existence. Qualitative analysis has previously focused on case studies in Tor such as the Silk Road which is only one small piece of the network. Websites are connected through hyperlinks which allows information to flow within Tor. This study explores the ways that Tor nodes are using these pathways and identifies core sites […]

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Surfacing Collaborated Networks in Dark Web to find Illicit and Criminal Content

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| Research Publications
The Tor Network, a hidden part of the Internet, is becoming an ideal hosting ground for illegal activities and services, including large drug markets, financial frauds, espionage, child sexual abuse. Researchers and law enforcement rely on manual investigations, which are both time-consuming and ultimately inefficient. The first part of this paper explores illicit and criminal content identified by prominent researchers in the dark web. We previously developed a web crawler that automatically searches websites on […]

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Identifying Digital Threats in a Hacker Web Forum

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| Research Publications
Information threatening the security of critical infrastructures are exchanged over the Internet through communication platforms, such as online discussion forums. This information can be used by malicious hackers to attack critical computer networks and data systems. Much of the literature on the hacking of critical infrastructure has focused on developing typologies of cyber-attacks, but has not examined the communication activities of the actors involved. To address this gap in the literature, the language of hackers […]

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Location, Location, Location: Mapping Potential Canadian Targets in Online Hacker Discussion Forums

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| Research Publications
The goal of this paper was to analyze hacker forums to better understand the threats they pose to Canadian critical systems specifically and cyber-security more generally. To facilitate the data collection, a customized web-crawler was developed to specifically capture the structured content posted to forums. Three hacker forums were selected for analysis that represented different facets of the hacker community: carding (data theft), coding (malware development and deployment), and security (distribution of vulnerabilities). We identified and […]

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