Sentiment Crawling: Extremist Content Collection through a Sentiment Analysis Guided Web-Crawler
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 s...
Uncovering the Dark Web: Examining Tor through social network analysis
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...
Surfacing Collaborated Networks in Dark Web to find Illicit and Criminal Content
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 i...
Identifying Digital Threats in a Hacker Web Forum
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...
Location, Location, Location: Mapping Potential Canadian Targets in Online Hacker Discussion Forums
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 th...
Networking in Child Exploitation – Assessing disruption strategies using registrant information
This research utilizes social network analysis to determine the success of three different disruption strategies on a child exploitation network extracted from the public internet.
Using a custom-written web-crawler called LECEN, data from a set of hyperlinked child-exploitation websites was collected from the Internet.
From these data, two types of networ...