Francis Fortin

Spam campaign detection, analysis, and investigation

Spam has been a major tool for criminals to conduct illegal activities on the Internet, such as stealing sensitive information, selling counterfeit goods, distributing malware, etc. The astronomical amount of spam data has rendered its manual analysis impractical. Moreover, most of the current techniques are either too complex to be applied on a large amount of data or miss the extraction of vital security insights for forensic purposes. In this paper, we elaborate a software framework for spam campaign detection, analysis and investigation. The proposed framework identifies spam campaigns on-the-fly. Additionally, it labels and scores the campaigns as well as gathers various information about them. The elaborated framework provides law enforcement officials with a powerful platform to conduct investigations on cyber-based criminal activities.

Policing the Hackers by Hacking Them: Studying Online Deviants in IRC Chat Rooms

The Internet is now an irreplaceable source of news and communication. While traditional data-gathering techniques such as surveys and interviews have proven useful in this environment, we believe that the monitoring of online communities will provide new and innovative datasets that will greatly enhance our comprehension of the criminal phenomenon in a virtual setting. This chapter describes how social researchers can tap into the Internet Chat Relay (IRC) to collect information on cyber deviants and build activity logs, social graphs and do content analysis. The research also provides an analysis of a dataset that was generated through this methodology and concludes on the limits and ethical problems that such a technique poses.