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This research investigated how online criminal activities can be better understood and connected using data-driven machine learning methods. Many illegal activities, such as human trafficking and illicit trade, have moved to online…
Anonymous social media platforms like Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper have emerged as important tools for sharing ideas without the fear of judgment. Such anonymous platforms are also important in nations under authoritarian rule, where…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Ever since the introduction of the internet, it has been void of any privacy. The majority of internet traffic currently is and always has been unencrypted. A number of anonymous communication overlay networks exist whose aim it is to…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more users…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
The proliferation of unreliable and biased information is a significant problem on the Internet. To assess the credibility of the information retrieved from news websites and other sources, users often resort to social platforms looking for…
Similar to what happens between humans in the real world, in open multi-agent systems distributed over the Internet, such as online social networks or wiki technologies, agents often form coalitions by agreeing to act as a whole in order to…
The introduction of the WebRTC API to modern browsers has brought about a new threat to user privacy. This API causes a range of client IP addresses to become available to a visited website via JavaScript even if a VPN is in use. This a…
Tor Onion Services are a way to host websites and other internet services anonymously. Onion Services are often used to bypass internet censorship and provide information services to users in oppressive regimes. This paper presents an…
Over the last two decades, the scale and complexity of Anonymous networks and its associated technologies grows exponentially as privacy has become a major concern of individuals. Also, some cyber attackers make use of privacy…
The availability of sophisticated technologies and methods of perpetrating criminogenic activities in the cyberspace is a pertinent societal problem. Darknet is an encrypted network technology that uses the internet infrastructure and can…
Being able to check whether an online advertisement has been targeted is essential for resolving privacy controversies and implementing in practice data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA. In this paper we describe the…
When surfing the Internet, individuals leak personal and corporate information to third parties whose (legitimate or not) businesses revolve around the value of collected data. The implications are serious, from a person unwillingly…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
Anonymous data collection systems allow users to contribute the data necessary to build services and applications while preserving their privacy. Anonymity, however, can be abused by malicious agents aiming to subvert or to sabotage the…