Description
1 online resource (xvi, 189 pages) : illustrations, maps, charts
Résumé
"Online predators, botmasters, and terrorists abuse the Internet and associated web technologies by conducting illegitimate activities such as bullying, phishing, and threatening. These activities often involve online messages between a criminal and a victim, or between criminals themselves. The forensic analysis of online messages to collect empirical evidence that can be used to prosecute cybercriminals in a court of law is one way to minimize most cybercrimes. The challenge is to develop innovative tools and techniques to precisely analyze large volumes of suspicious online messages. We develop a forensic analysis framework to help an investigator analyze the textual content of online messages with two main objectives. First, we apply our novel authorship analysis techniques for collecting patterns of authorial attributes to address the problem of anonymity in online communication. Second, we apply the proposed knowledge discovery and semantic analysis techniques for identifying criminal networks and their illegal activities. The focus of the framework is to collect creditable, intuitive, and interpretable evidence for both technical and non-technical professional experts including law enforcement personnel and jury members. To evaluate our proposed methods, we share our collaborative work with a local law enforcement agency. The experimental result on real-life data suggests that the presented forensic analysis framework is effective for cybercrime investigation."--Pages iii-iv.