On October 22, 2019, Dr. Nitin Agarwal presented his research “Exploring Deviant Hacker Networks On Social Media Platforms” during the Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity session of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) annual meeting in Seattle, WA.
The study, co-authored by COSMOS-alumni Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, focuses on malicious activities of hacker groups on social media. The authors call these groups Deviant Hacker Networks (DHNs). To gain a better understanding of DHNs and how they communicate with each other, the authors studied the connection between different DHNs on Twitter. The goal was to identify their key actors: which actors were well-connected, which ones sourced information and which actors acted as a bridge between network components. The authors also attempted to bridge the gap between the empirical study of social networks, machine learning, and cyber forensics, as the growth of online social networks (OSNs) is now bringing these domains together, due to OSNs continuously generating vast amounts of evidentiary data.
This research at COSMOS is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Army Research Office, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arkansas Research Alliance, and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Endowment at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations.