Characterizing eve: Analysing cybercrime actors in a large underground forum


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Conference Object
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Abstract

Underground forums contain many thousands of active users, but the vast majority will be involved, at most, in minor levels of deviance. The number who engage in serious criminal activity is small. That being said, underground forums have played a significant role in several recent high-profile cybercrime activities. In this work we apply data science approaches to understand criminal pathways and characterize key actors related to illegal activity in one of the largest and longest- running underground forums. We combine the results of a logistic regression model with k-means clustering and social network analysis, verifying the findings using topic analysis. We identify variables relating to forum activity that predict the likelihood a user will become an actor of interest to law enforcement, and would therefore benefit the most from intervention. This work provides the first step towards identifying ways to deter the involvement of young people away from a career in cybercrime.

Publication Date
2018
Online Publication Date
2018-09-07
Acceptance Date
2018-05-29
Keywords
Cybercrime, Underground forums, Social behaviour, Criminal pathways
Journal Title
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Journal ISSN
0302-9743
1611-3349
Volume Title
11050 LNCS
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M020320/1)
Alan Turing Institute (DS_SDS_1718_4)
Alan Turing Institute