On the Topology of the Dark Web of Terrorist Groups

In recent years, terrorist groups have used the WWW to spread their ideologies, disseminate propaganda, and recruit members. Studying the terrorist websites may help us understand the characteristics of these websites and predict terrorist activities. In this paper, we propose to apply network topological analysis methods on systematically collected the terrorist website data and to study the structural characteristics at the Web page level. We conducted a case study using the methods on three collections of Middle-Eastern, US domestic, and Latin-American terrorist websites. We found that these three networks have the small-world and scale-free characteristics. We also found that smaller size websites which share same interests tend to make stronger inter-website linkage relationships.