University of Twente Student Theses
Using stylometry to track cybercriminals in darknet forums
Ekambaranathan, Anirudh (2018) Using stylometry to track cybercriminals in darknet forums.
|
PDF
1MB |
| Abstract: | Darknet markets are becoming increasingly popular, making it important for law enforcement agencies to be aware of state of the art techniques on tracking and analysing key participants. In this work, we present an unsupervised method for linking user pseudonyms based on stylometry. We show on a Twitter dataset of 1,000 users that our method is 98.7\% accurate. We also construct a dataset containing the user migration after a darknet market closure. Subsequently, we use this dataset to show that our linking technique can be used to track displacement of users, even when ground truth data is not readily available. The results show that using bi-grams as input features, linkability can be achieved on a large scale. Even though effective linkability requires a minimum of 25 posts per user, we can still link a majority of active members in darknet market migrations. We also test five countermeasures to evade our linking technique and show that none of the measures would uphold if law enforcement agencies decided to perform dedicated linkage attacks. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Subject: | 54 computer science |
| Programme: | Computer Science MSc (60300) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/75908 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
Show download statistics for this publication
Show download statistics for this publicationRepository Staff Only: item control page