Dark Web Patterns

The Internet now provides a myriad of new ways to interact that eliminate physical distance, time, and even culture and language as factors affecting the development, maintenance, evolution, and even power of social networks. In these new social spaces, concepts such as privacy, property rights, and social mores that have developed over thousands of years in physical societies are being vetted and charily adopted in this new virtual world. We propose to develop a network monitoring system that can detect nefarious content, capture identifying information, build a stochastic network model of social relationships, and quickly determine if the social network demonstrates dark network properties. By using the classification of web spam as a standard, we seek to pinpoint the properties that uniquely categorize the malicious content and data sources through clustering techniques and serves as an initial approach to circumvent the proliferation of online dark networks.