NDLI: Doppelgänger Finder: Taking Stylometry to the Underground

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Afroz, S. Islam, A.C. Stolerman, A. Greenstadt, R. McCoy, D.
Copyright Year	2014
Description	Author affiliation: Univ. of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA (Afroz, S.)
Abstract	Stylometry is a method for identifying anonymous authors of anonymous texts by analyzing their writing style. While stylometric methods have produced impressive results in previous experiments, we wanted to explore their performance on a challenging dataset of particular interest to the security research community. Analysis of underground forums can provide key information about who controls a given bot network or sells a service, and the size and scope of the cybercrime underworld. Previous analyses have been accomplished primarily through analysis of limited structured metadata and painstaking manual analysis. However, the key challenge is to automate this process, since this labor intensive manual approach clearly does not scale. We consider two scenarios. The first involves text written by an unknown cybercriminal and a set of potential suspects. This is standard, supervised stylometry problem made more difficult by multilingual forums that mix l33t-speak conversations with data dumps. In the second scenario, you want to feed a forum into an analysis engine and have it output possible doppelgangers, or users with multiple accounts. While other researchers have explored this problem, we propose a method that produces good results on actual separate accounts, as opposed to data sets created by artificially splitting authors into multiple identities. For scenario 1, we achieve 77% to 84% accuracy on private messages. For scenario 2, we achieve 94% recall with 90% precision on blogs and 85.18% precision with 82.14% recall for underground forum users. We demonstrate the utility of our approach with a case study that includes applying our technique to the Carders forum and manual analysis to validate the results, enabling the discovery of previously undetected doppelganger accounts.
Starting Page	212
Ending Page	226
File Size	846068
Page Count	15
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781479946860
ISSN	10816011
DOI	10.1109/SP.2014.21
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2014-05-18
Publisher Place	USA
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Electronic mail Blogs Detectors Manuals Accuracy Social network services underground forum Stylometry cybercrime
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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