Cyber Intelligence and OSINT: Developing Mitigation Techniques Against Cybercrime Threats on Social Media

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) involve the collection or processes of gathering data and profiling of publicly available private and public sector information sources about individuals and business intelligence purposes. These sources includes internet and other social media platforms such as Facebook, emails, twitters, what’s apps for. Much debate and research has been done on the threats, vulnerabilities and the impact of the use of social media sites but this study is to minimize bias. Objective: To systematic review and synthesis findings on current empirical research topic on cyber intelligence and open source intelligence profiling to identifying both the threats and vulnerabilities on online social networks for mitigation purposes. Methods: A systematic narrative review of research using rigorous searching on online databases. The results were then subjected to review using a quantitative and quality appraisal tool and a narrative synthesis methodology. A theoretical framework was developed for the synthesis using concepts from the literature ‘The Effectiveness of Neighborhood Watch’. A Campbell Systematic Review Results: The systematic search retrieved 18 original research papers investigating and exploring the effects of online social media technologies on open source intelligence concepts. The use of social media were reported as enhancing social cohesion among peers, improving business opportunities as information gets to customers quickly. Safe identity experimentations, OSINT and cyber intelligence social media gathering is especially vital in the modern war on terror. Understanding terrorist network topologies, crime data analysis and mining, countering improvised explosive devices. The study also highlighted potential negative impacts and threats and the effect of social engineering threats in SNSs, threats of social networking and identity crime. Vulnerabilities of HTTP header information and cookies being sent to third-party aggregators as well harmful effects of exposure to threats. Conclusion: The systematic review has revealed extraordinary evidences and contradictory concepts. It has also revealed the underlining research challenges impacting on open source intelligence. Due to the invincibility nature of social media technologies, social media platforms are constantly being used for social, business and intelligence gathering purposes but to ensure proper and advance mitigating circumstance, further research is required to gain situational awareness and appropriate counter measure

Cluster detection inspatially repetitive events

Analyses of point event patterns in geography, ecology and epidemiology have a long tradition. Of particular interest are patterns of clustering or ‘hot spots’. Some point event patterns exhibit a tendency towards spatial repetitiveness although with temporal separation. Examples are burglary and traffic accidents. Spatial superimposition of point events challenges many existing approaches to spatial cluster detection. In this paper a variable resolution approach, Geo-ProZones, is applied to residential burglary data exhibiting a high level of repeat victimisation. This is coupled with robust normalisation as a means of consistently defining and visualising the ‘hot spots’

Mining Police-Recorded Offence and Incident Data to Inform a Definition of Repeat Domestic Abuse Victimization for Statistical Reporting

Following inspections in 2013 of all police forces, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary found that one-third of forces could not provide data on repeat victims of domestic abuse (DA) and concluded that in general there were ambiguities around the term ‘repeat victim’ and that there was a need for consistent and comparable statistics on DA. Using an analysis of police-recorded DA data from two forces, an argument is made for including both offences and non-crime incidents when identifying repeat victims of DA. Furthermore, for statistical purposes the counting period for repeat victimizations should be taken as a rolling 12 months from first recorded victimization. Examples are given of summary statistics that can be derived from these data down to Community Safety Partnership level. To reinforce the need to include both offences and incidents in analyses, repeat victim chronologies from policerecorded data are also used to briefly examine cases of escalation to homicide as an example of how they can offer new insights and greater scope for evaluating risk and effectiveness of interventions

Beware, win or lose: Domestic violence and the World Cup

In the run up to just about any mega sporting event these days (e.g. Football World and European Cups, Rugby World Cup, Super Bowl Sunday) there are warnings and public conversations about a likely rise in domestic violence (DV) during these events. London 2012 is no exception – Figure 1 is a beer mat used in the London Borough of Newham (one of the London 2012 ‘Host Boroughs’) as part of its campaign in the run-up to and during the Games period. Many of these conversations, in the UK at least, quote a Home Office report 1 which purports to have found a link during the 2006 FIFA World Cup between sporting events, alcohol consumption and DV. The report states that “major sporting events do not cause DV, as perpetrators are responsible for their actions, but the levels of alcohol consumption linked to the highly charged emotional nature of those events seems to increase the prevalence of such incidents” (p36). Campaigners would argue that DV is a serious every day event not caused by sport or alcohol and that public consciousness of this scourge should not just be tied to particular sporting fixtures or tournaments. Spikes in DV can be much larger, for example, over Christmas and New Year. Nevertheless, the perennial nature of the debate around DV and football prompted the second author of this paper, a BBC journalist, to put the 2006 Home Office conclusions to the test for the 2010 FIFA World Cup (though the story was not run by the BBC until the 2012 UEFA Cup2). For reasons discussed below, police recorded figures of DV are more problematic than, say, burglary or theft of a vehicle, and finding a suitable control against which to test the significance of any change is particularly problematic. This paper gives a more in-depth presentation of the thinking behind the analysis

Improving Geocoding Rates in Preparation for Crime Data Analysis

The new geocoding toolkit (matching a crime to the geographic location where it occurred) has been developed in order to improve the "hit" rate (rate at which a batch of crimes can be accurately located on a map). The purpose of the toolkit is not to replace commercial address-matching software such as Matchcode or QAS, but to enhance the outcome of the geocoding process by building additional steps and tools around these existing software products. It is a five-stage process. The first stage cleans common errors that arise in the address fields of crime data. In the second stage, the crime data are passed through commercial address-matching software, which attaches geographic coordinates to the crime location based on a street address. All addresses successfully geocoded at this stage are given the validation code "L1," indicating that the crime has been linked to an individual property address at the highest level of accuracy. The third stage focuses on crimes with nonaddress locations. The majority of these are street junctions and can be found in the free-text data field that describes the venue of the crime incident. Other nonaddress locations would include railway stations, bus stations, and prominent landmarks. The junctions are text-mined by searching for key words. In the fourth stage, all remaining records with a valid unit postcode (mail delivery point) are geocoded at the postcode level. The final stage of the toolkit geocodes all remaining records according to street name. A test of this system in a British police force raised the "hit" rate for accurate crime location an additional 65 percent to a rate of 91 percent

Scenario-based Small Area Population Modelling for Social Infrastructure Planning

In recent years, the geodemographic makeup of some areas in the UK has been rapidly changing. For example, immigration has put more pressure on child services, education and health care in places such as Slough, Peterborough and the Thames Gateway. Other factors affecting the Thames Gateway are housing development as part of the massive regeneration and the development and legacy of the Olympic site. This region is also experiencing high population churn, uncertainty in its demographic composition and issues in matching service delivery. There are also increasing demands for building sustainable communities that can adapt to change. A key to maintaining sustainable communities is the quality of services and opportunities afforded by the social infrastructure. Where the needs of residents rapidly change due to (im)migration, social and economic mobility and transience, there needs to be robust mechanisms for compiling and updating the evidence base on which policy and planning changes must necessarily be founded. This paper proposes scenario-base small area population modelling with multiple administrative data sources as a means of evidencing change. It is being implemented in the Thames Gateway London boroughs, with funding from UrbanBuzz (www.urbanbuzz.org) to support local social infrastructure planning

A Semantic Rule-Based Approach for Software Privacy by Design

Information system business is currently witnessing an increasing demand for system conformance with the international regime of GRC Governance, Risk and Compliance. Among different compliance approaches, data protection and privacy laws plays a key role. In this paper, we propose a compliance requirement analysis method from early stages of system modelling based on a semantically-rich model, where a mapping can be established from data protection and privacy requirements defined by laws and regulations to system business goals and contexts. The early consideration of requirements satisfies Privacy by Design, a key concept in General Data Protection Regulation 2012. The proposed semantic model consists of a number of ontologies each corresponding to a knowledge component within the developed framework of our approach. Each ontology is a thesaurus of concepts in the compliance related to system along with relationships and rules between these concepts that encompass the domain knowledge. The main contribution of the work presented in this paper is the ontology-based compliance framework that demonstrates how description-logic reasoning techniques can be used to simulate legal reasoning requirements employed by legal professions against the description of each ontology

Mobile Geographic Information Systems

This Chapter introduces the concept of Mobile Geographical Information Systems (Mobile GIS) as an evolution of conventional GIS to being available on wireless mobile devices such as smart phones. The evolution of the technology and its applications are charted in this Chapter. The main elements of Mobile GIS are then discussed. This focuses on: GIS servers; wireless mobile telecommunication networks; wireless mobile devices; location-awareness technology; and gateway services. This is followed by a discussion of the main features in terms of the services and usage of Mobile GIS: mobility; real-time connectivity; location-awareness; broadened usage. Mobile GIS are an important facilitating technology for Location-Based Services (LBS). A range of applications of Mobile GIS for smart phones are described. The Chapter closes with a discussion of the prospects and challenges for Mobile GIS. Challenges derive from four broad areas: limitations that derive from the technologies being used; areas of GIScience that still need to be adequately researched; users; and business models for a sustainable presence

Geographical Variation in GP drug prescribing for Schizophrenia and similar psychosis in England

Visualising and analysing geographical patterns in mental illness can be a starting point for understanding and creating effective policy around inequalities and how to resolve them. This research note looks at geographical variations in GP prescribing for Schizophrenia and similar psychosis using open Presentation-level Data for England downloaded from NHS Digital. We found considerable geographical variation in both the level of prescribing per thousand population at Local Authority level and in the rate of change measured over five years. There is a statistically significant north-south divide in prescribing. We have used social marketing geodemographics to explore possible correlates with the geographical patterns. Highest positive correlations shows links to deprivation and less healthy lifestyle choices. Seeing the geographical variation is in itself informative and a potential eye-opener. In doing so, new questions can be asked of the data, practice and polic