Human-factors driven internet forensics: Analysis and tools.

摘要

The Internet is evolving into a medium that is beyond just web search. Initially its goal was simply to serve as a mechanism to transfer simple messages such as file transfer. In the past events that happen in the cyber and physical worlds were independent. This was due to the fact that the Internet was not available to the general public its; uses were in research, government, and education since it was funded initially by the government. Today the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities causing social networks and collaborative services such as Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, etc to flourish and to communicate and share interests in many ways. Although these networks and the Internet as a whole provide us with many positive impacts in our lives, this in turn has caused there to be an increasing correlation between the cyber world and the physical worlds. There are physical events that have impact on the cyber world. For one, the impact of the economic meltdown of the financial markets has caused a tremendous increase of scam postings on websites such as craigslist, ebay promising financial freedom, emails from lotteries informing you that you have won the jackpot and asking to send a fee for processing. Likewise there have been impacts between the cyber world and the physical world. Terrorist propaganda websites provide false information to increase recruitment and collection of funds. Other recent examples include a woman in Minnesota who was murdered after responding to an ad for a babysitting posting in craigslist, and the case of a mother who pretended to be a sixteen-year-old boy in Myspace and was in communication with a thirteen-year-old girl, which led ultimately to the suicide of this thirteen year old girl. It can be clearly seen from the above examples that the Internet today has created an environment that provides a second life to many of its users that can be completely contradictory to their real life.;There needs to be a mechanism or tool(s) to help visualize and or identify patterns between the cyber and physical worlds. The challenge is to determine if such patterns can be identified, which in turn could help provide leads to law enforcement officials. In this dissertation we will discuss some of the tools that can be used to help identify patterns of deception.