WACCO 2020

We outline in this article a study of ‘adversarial scraping’ for academic research, which involves the collection of data from websites that implement defences against traditional web scraping tools. Although this is primarily a research methods article, it also constitutes a valuable systematic accounting of the different defensive techniques used by the administrators of illicit online services. Some of these administrators intentionally implement functionality which attempts to prevent web scrapers from gathering data from their site, and some will unintentionally design their sites in ways that make data gathering harder. This is of particular importance for criminological research, where websites such as cryptomarkets and underground forums are publicly available (and hence there is an ethical case for data collection), but the illicit activity involved means that the administrators of these services limit scraping. We classify different anti-crawling techniques taken by websites and outline our developed countermeasures. Based on this, we evaluate which of these methods do and do not succeed at preventing data gathering from a website, as well as those which impact the scraper but do not necessarily prevent the data from being obtained. We find that there are some defences that, if used together, might thwart scraping. There are also a series of defences that are successful at slowing down scrapers, making historical scraping more difficult. On the other hand, we show that many defences are easy to work around and do not impact scraping.

The rapid expansion of cyberspace has greatly facilitated the strategic shift of traditional crimes to online platforms. This has included malicious actors, such as extremist organisations, making use of online networks to disseminate propaganda and incite violence through radicalising individuals. In this article, we seek to advance current research by exploring how supporters of extremist organisations craft and disseminate their content, and how posts from counter-extremism agencies compare to them. In particular, this study will apply computational techniques to analyse the narratives of various pro-extremist and counter-extremist Twitter accounts, and investigate how the psychological motivation behind the messages compares between pro-ISIS and counter-extremism narratives. Our findings show that pro-extremist accounts often use different strategies to disseminate content (such as the types of hashtags used) when compared to counter-extremist accounts across different types of organisations, including accounts of governments and NGOs. Through this study, we provide unique insights into both extremist and counter-extremist narratives on social media platforms. Furthermore, we define several avenues for discussion regarding the extent to which counter-messaging may be effective at diminishing the online influence of extremist and other criminal organisations.

The acknowledgement that cybercrime offenders are embedded within local contexts presents a broad vector for further study. But research in this area is still in its early days and many topics need to be developed further. Foremost among these is the geography of cybercrime. This endeavour has an important policy contribution to make. For example, if we can determine which countries are producing cybercrime at more significant levels, preventative measures can be specifically targeted to those countries. The first step within such a research agenda must be the development of an index of cybercriminality by country, as this is foundational to identifying hubs of digital offending and the factors driving the emergence of these hubs. This paper is methodological in its contribution, and does not offer its own empirical findings. Instead, it aims to provide some broad foundational thinking for a very challenging research exercise, and it is intended to support later, more refined, efforts to develop indices. It consists of two components. First, it reviews existing attempts to identify and rank cybercrime hotspots. Second, it draws important lessons from these works towards developing a successful index. Some methodological points are made on what the way forward may be for this emerging field, and how a reliable and valid index on cybercriminality could be crafted.