PostCog: A “Search Engine” Enabling Interdisciplinary Research into Underground Forums at Scale

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• Anh V. Vu, University of Cambridge
• Friday 27 May 2022, 16:00-17:00
• Webinar & FW11, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Kieron Ivy Turk.

Underground forums provide useful insights into cybercrime, where researchers analyse underlying economies, key actors, their discussions and interactions, as well as different types of cybercrime. This interdisciplinary topic of study incorporates expertise from diverse areas, including computer science, criminology, economics, psychology, and other social sciences. Historically, there were significant challenges around access to data, but there are now research datasets of millions of messages scraped from underground forums. The problems now stem from the size of these datasets and the technical nature of methods and tools available for data sampling and analysis at scale, which make data exploration difficult for non-technical users.

We introduce PostCog, a web application developed to support users from both technical and non-technical backgrounds in forum analyses, such as search, information extraction and cross-forum comparison. The prototype’s usability is evaluated through two user studies with expert users of the CrimeBB dataset. PostCog is made available for academic research upon signing an agreement with the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre.

Zoom details: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81692776088?pwd=Z1lBaG1jOUJWWnFsK29oQWdUQjNYZz09

Meeting ID: 816 9277 6088 , Passcode: 874860

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Security Seminar series.

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