Izabela Savice PhD Seminar 1

Abstract: LAAW – Linguistic Authorship Analysis of the Dark Web

Each year thousands of Canadians, and millions of people worldwide, fall victim to a variety of crimes such as human trafficking, terrorism, gun violence, and cyber-attacks. While these crimes may seem unrelated, they can be traced back to the dark web. The dark web has become a hub for nefarious criminal behaviours such as terrorism, hacking services, and drug and arms sales. Recent evidence demonstrates that criminal networks are complex, and domains do not operate in isolation. Previous findings explore the funding of terrorism through drugs and arms sales, hacking services, and organ and human trafficking. The dark web is a problem space that requires global private and governmental partnerships. It poses many challenges to law enforcement due to its ever-growing size, anonymity-granting technology, and reliance on manual analysis of content.

We propose to construct a full dark web analysis and topology tool which aim to link criminal actors in multiple criminal domains. This will be done by collecting data from various dark web sites belonging to different criminal domains. As evidence has shown that terrorism on the dark web interacts with multiple domains on the dark web – it demonstrates a need for multi-domain solutions. With many dark web sites not linking to other sites, there is a need to explore solutions beyond traditional crawling techniques. The behaviour of a single user with multiple accounts on different dark web sites is not uncommon. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that users are the links between multiple dark web sites and crime domains. It is in the interest of law enforcement to link these online identities, and the combination of information between different accounts can provide useful information to an investigation. We introduce the innovative approach of using linguistic analysis to link multiple accounts to a single user. This will allow the detection of links between different domains, sites, and communities in the dark web. This innovative solution will help provide the necessary tools to law enforcement to better direct their work efforts and save the lives of many.