The Infiltration Game: Artificial Immune System for the Exploitation of Crime Relevant Information in Social Networks

摘要

Efficient and sensitive monitoring of social networks has become increasingly important for criminal investigations and crime prevention during the last years. However, with the growing amount of data and increasing complexity to be considered, monitoring tasks are difficult to handle, up to a point where manual observation is infeasible in most cases and, thus, automated systems are very much needed. In this paper, a system of adaptive agents is proposed, which aims at monitoring publicly accessible parts of a given social network for malign actions, such as propaganda, hate speeches or other malicious posts and comments made by groups or individuals. Subsequently, some of these agents try to gain access to crime relevant information exchanged in closed environments said individuals or groups are potentially part of. The presented monitoring and investigation processes are implemented by mimicking central aspects of the human immune system. The monitoring processes are realized by network-traversing informant units similar to pathogen-sensing macrophages, which initialize the human immune response. The subsequent investigation process is commenced by gathering information automatically about the targeted individual or group. Furthermore, based on the gathered information one can identify closed and usually inaccessible environments in the social network (e.g., private groups). Using so-called endoceptor units - automatically generated social bots imitating environment-typical appearance and communication - closed environments are accessed through individuals susceptible to the bot's strategy. Once being part of the closed network, an endoceptor aims to intercept and report back crime relevant communications and information to the investigators.