Social cyber forensics: leveraging open source information and social network analysis to advance cyber security informatics

摘要

In this paper, we introduce the concept of social cyber forensics and its usability. Then, we introduce a tool, i.e., Maltego that can be used to study the cross-media affiliation and uncover hidden relations among various online groups. We also provide three stepwise methodologies that leverage Maltego and various open source information to uncover the hidden relationship among (1) Twitter accounts and a set of websites/blogs; (2) websites/blogs and other websites/blogs; or (3) infer the ownership of a set of websites/blogs. These methodologies have been tested during many cyber propaganda campaigns that were projected against NATO forces. A high-level view of these case studies that leveraged the concepts and methodologies provided in this paper are briefly highlighted here while the details of each case were published in various venues which are pointed out for interested readers.