Blog – Page 5 – The Dark Crawler

Illicit payments for illicit goods: noncontact drug distribution on Russian online drug marketplaces

The distribution or consumption of traditional drugs has become the subject of stringent penalties throughout most of the world and synthetic designer drugs have become the alternative. Novel psychoactive substances, also called ‘legal highs’, are highly varied in terms of chemical composition. These substances are advertised and distributed as an alternative to traditional drugs on the Internet, making identification of new substances and enforcement difficult. For this article, we downloaded and analysed 28 Russian-language online […]

Shuffle Up and Deal: Use of a Capture–Recapture Method to Estimate the Size of Stolen Data Markets

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| Research Publications

Often overlooked in the measurement of crime is the underlying size of offender populations. This holds true for online property crimes involving the sale, purchase, and use of stolen financial data. Though available data suggests that online frauds are steadily increasing, there are currently no estimates of the scope of this offender population. The current study addresses this issue by using capture–recapture methods to estimate the size of the population participating in stolen data markets […]

Comparing SVD and word2vec for analysis of malware forum posts

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| Research Publications

Many corpora of intelligence interest are so large that it is impractical to read them entirely. Analysts need tools that will focus attention on significant structures and particular documents. Here we exploit singular value decomposition and word2vec as tools for this purpose, and compare them with one another in a real-world application — a malware forum from the dark web. Authors: Nasser Alsadhan, David Skillicorn, Richard Frank Published: International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source […]

Searching for signs of extremism on the web: an introduction to Sentiment-based Identification of Radical Authors

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| Research Publications

As violent extremists continue to surface in online discussion forums, law enforcement agencies search for new ways of uncovering their digital indicators. Researchers have both described and hypothesized a number of ways to detect online traces of potential extremists, yet this area of inquiry remains in its infancy. This study proposes a new search method that, through the analysis of sentiment, identifies the most radical users within online forums. Although this method is applicable to […]

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 […]