Candice Lanier* says with predators using the internet to find victims, law enforcement has also been employing technology to apprehend suspects.
Photo: Donald Tong
Approximately 13 per cent of child internet users receive unwanted sexual solicitations.
One in 25 internet users under 18 have received an online sexual solicitation in which the solicitor attempted to make contact offline.
And, 76 per cent of initial encounters of a predator with an internet-initiated sex crimes victim take place in online chat rooms.
Additionally, most juvenile victims of internet-initiated sex crimes willingly meet the predator face-to-face and 93 per cent of those encounters include sexual contact.
Child sexual exploitation impacts all races, nationalities and socioeconomic groups around the world.
As predators are increasingly using the internet to find victims, law enforcement has also been employing various types of technology to apprehend suspects.
Last August, for instance, Bleeping Computer reported on a case in which police used a booby trapped video, which led to the arrest of an online sexual predator.
VPN logs have also been used recently to track down cybercriminals.
Algorithm created to identify sexual predators
Scientists in the US have now developed an algorithm that can pinpoint sexual predators on internet chat boards.
This tool, the Chat Analysis Triage Tool (CATT), could be implemented by the end of the year.
Designed by researchers at the Purdue University College of Technology, this tool was devised to help law enforcement track down and arrest sexual predators by identifying the sex offenders most likely to pose the most danger.
To create the algorithm, over 4,300 messages from 107 online discussions were compiled.
These messages all involved sexual predators who had already been arrested.
The researchers were then able to identify redundancies in the words used by these predators.
Analysis of the redundancies includes the “self-disclosure” mechanism used by sexual predators.
It is a tactic in which the suspect tries to gain the trust of the victim by sharing a personal story, usually negative, such as parental violence.
The basis of CATT is made up of these observations.
The tool enables law enforcement to quantify the level of solicitations of the person and approximate an individual’s age by analysing the language.
It can also assist law enforcement with setting up a fake (undercover) profile of a child that is an accurate representation of a child in a given age range.
Once the offender initiates a conversation with the fake profile, law enforcement can begin reeling the suspect in.
Additionally, the algorithm provides analysis of the risks and the probability that the suspect will try to come into direct contact with the victim.
According to the researchers, utilising this assessment increases efficiency because it allows law enforcement to prioritise cases in which the risk to children is the most severe.
* Candice Lanier is Chief Operations Officer of Ghost Cyber Intelligence, a private intel agency. She tweets at @CandiceLanier.
This article first appeared at www.bleepingcomputer.com.
