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Introduction: the new criminal
scenario and Internet
The development of computer science and networks has pushed the
renewal of several kind of criminality. We can consider, for
example, international crimes such as prostitution, drugs, weapons,
etc where there must be an international leader-group in a nation
ad a set of cells distributed in a lot of other nations to ensure
the illegal exchange of material, people, etc.. The fast and
effective communication among different cells is a key to success
and Internet seems to be a very good channel to perform this kind
of coordination.
The organized crime understood that very well and uses Internet as
an effective way for money laundering and for a lot of other
illegal activities. In the same way we can find several religious
and/or sub-cultural sects that adopted Internet as the best mean to
contact people, adepts, etc.. From this point of view there are
web-sites related to child-pornography, violence, suicide, racial
hatred etc (Strano M., 2000, Rossi A., Innamorati M., 2004). New
kind of terrorism threats the nations: the information war against
the main telecommunication nodes that links all the parts of the
world. We can speak about cyberterrorists. They use Internet to
make publicity and to spread their ideas. Anyway the best use of
Internet they can do is to coordinate real actions such as
terrorist attacks (Strano A., Neigre B., Galdieri P, 2002).
In this environment the child-abuse and child-pornography found new
dimensions. We can understand this looking at the increase of this
phenomena in the last years (Strano 2000). Internet makes the
paedophile able to communicate in a easy and safe way with a lot of
other criminals in the world to share information, pictures,
videos, etc.. Child-pornography material is of course the main
target for paedophile on Internet but we can find also web-sites
that tries to present paedophilia as a legitimate thing.
New Investigation techniques on
Internet
To be effective against the mentioned new criminal "digital"
strategies we have to implement a strong supervision of digital
communications (mostly Chat, emails and web-sites). We worked on
Spider software that is able to scan the Internet looking for
crime-related areas to develop a kind of web-intelligence. The
software looks for conversations, strings, etc implementing an high
level textual analysis to localize relevant information among
thousands of sites, newsgroups, etc on the web.
Web-inteligence on Internet using the software
spider ICAA
The ICAA research team for tecno-intelligence developed the
software to search for cultural paedophilia, racial hatred and
pseudo-religions related web sites. This program is made of several
parts:
Web crawler. It uses the semantic analysis of
the natural language to summarize the content of web-sites. The
iperlinks found on the web-sites are then stored on a database to
be used in other analysis.
Method Database. The web-crawler is a kind of
export system and this component is the knowledge base. It's a set
of rules (semantic/syntactic) and data (dictionary) that can be
used by the crawler in its analysis process.
Link Database. This database includes the
iperlinks the crawler found on the web-sites. The following fields
are stored:
- 1. Data creation/updating of the web-page;
- 2. Type of iperlink: towards the same server or towards
external servers;
- 3. Programming language used (asp, php, jsp)
- 4. Name, dimension and date of the linked file (if it is);
- 5. If the iperlink is an email address the software submit it
to google (research-engine) to localize it in other areas on
Internet.
Enterprise Manager. The administration tool. It
allows the operator to check the actions of the crawler and to
change the content of the databases.
Front End d'Analisi. User interface that allows
to access the software obtaining high level reports or plan
specific analysis/researches.
Google Interface. Interface between the
software and the search engine Google.
Example
We need to analyze a racial hatred
related web-site. First of all we introduce the url of the web-site
inside the Link Database then we will establish the rules in the
Method Database to classify the pages such as:
- Analyze only this web-site or all the linked ones;
- Study the email addresses you find using Google;
- Search for special words (in the dictionary);
- Set the analysis depth ;
- Create a new dictionary;
- Frequency analysis of the terms;
- Create the connection cluster ;
- analyze the technical features of the web-site;
- analyze the circular-links;
These pieces of data will be submited to the Enterprise Manager.
The web Crawler (o programma spider) now can start the analysis
process. After the elaboration the Front End will present:
- 1. The clusters
- 2. the most used terms;
- 3. the used technology;
- 4. Statistics about the resource involved;
- 5. email address list;
Conclusions
As mentioned the ICAA W.I.
system is able to analyze in depth web-areas looking for specific
subjects (crime related) and localizing interconnections with other
web-sites.
The use of this kind of approach reduces the time to search of the
classic web-intelligence (human-based searching). The constant
monitoring could be easily and automatically implementing based on
this software. The system can be used to present periodical reports
that a specialised human analyst could evacuate and submit to the
police forces.
Riferimenti bibliografici
- www.criminologia.org (Telematic Journal of Clinical
Criminology)
- Galdieri P., Giustozzi C., Strano M, Sicurezza e privacy in
azienda, Apogeo editore, Milano, 2001.
- Innamorati M., Rossi A., La Rete dell'Odio, E. Walter Casini,
Roma, 2004.
- Strano M., Computer crime, Ed. Apogeo, Milano, 2000
- Strano M., Neigre B., Galdieri P., Cyberterrorismo, Jackson
Libri, Milano, 2002
- 1 International Crime Analysis Association
- 2 The analyzed web-sites are represented by a graphical tree.
The depth is the number of levels of the tree. Greater is the
number of allowed levels to analyze greater is the elaboration
effort.
- 3 Set of sites that are linked one another;
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