Profiling and Tracking a Cyberlocker Link Sharer in a Public Web Forum

Abstract

The expanding utilization of cyberlocker services is driven by the illegal exchange of copyrighted materials. In fact, the illegal exchange of copyrighted materials is the largest contributor to global Internet traffic. However, due to the anonymity provided by cyberlockers, it is difficult to track user identities directly from cyberlocker sites. Since cyberlocker users upload and share links via third-party sites, it is possible to harvest cyberlocker-related data from these sites and connect the data to specific users. This chapter describes a framework for collecting cyberlocker data from web forums and using cyberlocker link sharing behavior to identify users. Multidimensional scaling analysis and agglomerative hierarchical clustering analysis are performed on user profiles to yield clusters of forum users with similar sharing characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework provides valuable insights in investigations of cyberlocker-based piracy.

Tracking and Taxonomy of Cyberlocker Link Sharers Based on Behavior Analysis

“…Moreover, it is crucial that law enforcement agents and other officials who combat the crimes have better understanding of the underlying criminal behaviors; therefore, the taxonomy of cyberlocker users is helpful to summarize the behaviors and provide investigative leads. Our previous research (Fan, 2015) proposed a preliminary model to construct profile for forum user with shared cyberlocker links as features. In this research, the objective is to build a framework which extracts more comprehensive sharing behaviors to profile forum users, finds relationships between different profiles, and builds the taxonomy of users to generate general profiles for different categories of users.…”