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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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- Child Exploitation (3)
- Internet (3)
- Social Network Analysis (3)
- Cybercrime (2)
- Web-crawler (2)
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- Child Pornography (1)
- Computer Crime (1)
- Criminal Careers (1)
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- Educational Institutions (1)
- Image Hash Database (1)
- Law Enforcement Priorities (1)
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- Network Disruption (1)
- Online Child Exploitation (1)
- Organizations (1)
- Survival Analysis (1)
- Target Prioritization (1)
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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Criminal Careers In Cyberspace: Examining Website Failure Within Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce G. Westlake, Martin Bouchard
Criminal Careers In Cyberspace: Examining Website Failure Within Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce G. Westlake, Martin Bouchard
Bryce Garreth Westlake
Publically accessible, illegal, websites represent an additional challenge for control agencies, but also an opportunity for researchers to monitor, in real time, changes in criminal careers. Using a repeated measures design, we examine evolution in the networks that form around child exploitation (CE) websites, over a period of 60 weeks, and determine which criminal career dimensions predict website failure. Network data were collected using a custom-designed web-crawler. Baseline survival rates were compared to networks surrounding (legal) sexuality and sports websites. Websites containing CE material were no more likely to fail than comparisons. Cox regression analyses suggest that increased volumes of …
Comparing Methods For Detecting Child Exploitation Content Online, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Comparing Methods For Detecting Child Exploitation Content Online, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Bryce Garreth Westlake
The sexual exploitation of children online is seen as a global issue and has been addressed by both governments and private organizations. Efforts thus far have focused primarily on the use of image hash value databases to find content. However, recently researchers have begun to use keywords as a way to detect child exploitation content. Within the current study we explore both of these methodologies. Using a custom designed web-crawler, we create three networks using the hash value method, keywords method, and a hybrid method combining the first two. Results first show that the three million images found in our …
Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank
Bryce Garreth Westlake
The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) …
Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake
Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake
Bryce Garreth Westlake
This paper seeks to determine which attack strategies (hub, bridge, or fragmentation) are most effective at disrupting two online child pornography networks in terms of outcome measures that include density, clustering, compactness, and average path length. For this purpose, two networks were extracted using a web-crawler that recursively follows child exploitation sites. It was found that different attack strategies were warranted depending on the outcome measure and the network structure. Overall, hub attacks were most effective at reducing network density and clustering, whereas fragmentation attacks were most effective at reducing the network's distance-based cohesion and average path length. In certain …
The Structure And Content Of Online Child Exploitation Networks, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard
The Structure And Content Of Online Child Exploitation Networks, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard
Bryce Garreth Westlake
The emergence of the Internet has provided people with the ability to find and communicate with others of common interests. Unfortunately, those involved in the practices of child exploitation have also received the same benefits. Although law enforcement continues its efforts to shut down websites dedicated to child exploitation, the problem remains uncurbed. Despite this, law enforcement has yet to examine these websites as a network and determine their structure, stability and susceptibleness to attack. We extract the structure and features of four online child exploitation networks using a custom-written webpage crawler. Social network analysis is then applied with the …