Classifying Illegal Activities On Tor Network Based On Web Textual Contents

by Mhd Wesam Al Nabki, Eduardo Fidalgo, Enrique Alegre & Ivan de Paz; Department of Electrical, Systems and Automation, University of Leon, Spain & INCIBE Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute

Abstract

The freedom of the Deep Web offers a safe place where people can express themselves anonymously but they also can conduct illegal activities. In this paper, we present and make publicly available [1] a new dataset for Darknet active domains, which we call ”Darknet Usage Text Addresses” (DUTA). We built DUTA by sampling the Tor network during two months and manually labeled each address into 26 classes. Using DUTA, we conducted a comparison between two well-known text representation techniques crossed by three different supervised classifiers to categorize the Tor hidden services. We also fixed the pipeline elements and identified the aspects that have a critical influence on the classification results. We found that the combination of TF-IDF words representation with Logistic Regression classifier achieves 96.6% of 10 folds cross-validation accuracy and a macro F1 score of 93.7% when classifying a subset of illegal activities from DUTA. The good performance of the classifier might support potential tools to help the authorities in the detection of these activities.

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Enfuse 2017 – Las Vegas 22-25 May

From the 22nd to the 25th of May 2017, Forensic Focus will be attending Enfuse (formerly known as CEIC) in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. If there are any topics you’d particularly like us to cover, or any speakers you think we should interview, please let us know in the comments.

There are several tracks running throughout the conference, including Cybersecurity, Incident Response, Data Governance, eDiscovery, and Basic & Advanced tracks in Conducting Digital Forensic Investigations.

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Forensic Focus Forum Round-Up

Welcome to this month’s round-up of recent posts to the Forensic Focus forums.

How would you check whether a USB had been connected to a specific computer?

Can you help another member determine whether software running on a device could monitor the end user via an integrated camera?

Forum members discuss forensic readiness in organisations.

What career paths would you recommend for this digital forensics student?

Do you have any suggestions for Pachuco’s child protection case?

How would you find out whether an ASF video file had been tampered with?

Add your recommendations for free imaging software for Mac.

What measures do you take to protect your machines against malware?

How would you recover messages from an LG 328BG?

Can you help this forum member explain why two E01s have different MD5s?

Do you have any recommendations for athena’s forensic imager / multifunction suite?

Forum members discuss licensing requirements in the USA. Continue reading Forensic Focus Forum Round-Up

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Access Your Data Hassle-Free With The MSAB Single Driver

Getting access to your data is now quicker and simplified with the Windows driver software for USB.

This solution from MSAB lets you skip the step of having to install separate drivers for each mobile device brand. Rather, it allows you to communicate with a wide range of devices using only one driver – saving you precious time, and simplifying both the installation and usage of MSAB products. Continue reading Access Your Data Hassle-Free With The MSAB Single Driver

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Job Vacancy: Account Executive (Federal) – Washington, DC

Position Description
BlackBag Technologies, a leading data forensics company, is seeking a Senior Account Executive to support our growing customer base. You will be responsible for the generation of new sales opportunities for our digital forensic software products within the U.S. Federal marketspace. Candidates should have solid experience driving deal flow, exceeding sales objectives, and genuine care about solving customer’s problems and feel comfortable working in a small, entrepreneurial environment. Continue reading Job Vacancy: Account Executive (Federal) – Washington, DC

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Interview With David Spreadborough, International Trainer, Amped Software

David, can you tell us a bit about your role and what it involves?

I’m the international trainer for Amped Software. First of all, Amped Software is a digital image and video company and everything that we do has a forensic and scientific backing. It’s very easy to deal with an image or a video, but to deal with an image or a video forensically, with a scientific backing, requires a product to guarantee that everything a user does is forensically sound.

My history is that I was a police officer for 24 years; the last 12 years were spent purely doing CCTV and image investigations, mainly from CCTV. I left in 2015, upon the closure of the Forensic Imaging Unit.

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