The Spider-man Behavior Protocol: Exploring Both Public and Dark Social Networks for Fake Identity Detection in Terrorism Informatics

Hiding true personality behind a façade is one of the basic tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a façade behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities and their planning. Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a dangerous activity, possibly illegal, behind an apparentely neutral and mean public person, can be replicated, and sometimes just provided, by a social network profile. Recognizing that a social network profile is fake, in some extreme cases, a bot, and determining the contour relationships that limit such a condition is one of the most important weapons for terrorism fight. In this paper we show that what we name the Spider-man protocol, a set of behaviour rules that bring to hiding a personality behind a façade, has several weaknesses, and it is prone to a set of attacks that permit to detect these behaviours. We provide the description of an experimental architecture that is used for determining violations of the protocol, and therefore breaches in the secrecy of the individual protection settled by the terrorists.