I recently travelled to Pittsburgh, USA, to present the paper “From Playing Games to Committing Crimes: A Multi-Technique Approach to Predicting Key Actors on an Online Gaming Forum” at eCrime 2019, co-authored with Ben Collier and Alice Hutchings. The accepted version of the paper can be accessed here.

The structure and content of various underground forums have been studied in the literature, from threat detection to the classification of marketplace advertisements. These platforms can provide a mechanism for knowledge sharing and a marketplace between cybercriminals and other members.

However, gaming-related activity on underground hacking forums have been largely unexplored. Meanwhile, UK law enforcement believe there is a potential link between playing online games and committing cybercrime—a possible cybercrime pathway. A small-scale study by the NCA found that users looking for gaming cheats on these types of forums can lead to interactions with users involved in cybercrime, leading to a possible first offences, followed by escalating levels of offending. Also, there has been interest from UK law enforcement in exploring intervention activity which aim to deter gamers from becoming involved in cybercrime activity.

We begin to explore this by presenting a data processing pipeline framework, used to identify potential key actors on a gaming-specific forum, using predictive and clustering methods on an initial set of key actors. We adapt open-source tools created for use in analysis of an underground hacking forum and apply them to this forum. In addition, we add NLP features, machine learning models, and use group-based trajectory modelling.

From this, we can begin to characterise key actors, both by looking at the distributions of predictions, and from inspecting each of the models used. Social network analysis, built using author-replier relationships, shows key actors and predicted key actors are well connected, and group-based trajectory modelling highlights a much higher proportion of key actors are contained in both a high-frequency super-engager trajectory in the gaming category, and in a high-frequency super-engager posting activity in the general category.

This work provides an initial look into a perceived link between playing online games and committing cybercrime by analysing an underground forum focused on cheats for games.