The Dark Web Portal Project: Collecting and Analyzing the Presence of Terrorist Groups on the Web

Abstract

While the Web has evolved to be a global information platform for anyone to use, terrorists are also using the Web to their own advantages. Many terrorist organizations and their sympathizers are using Web sites and online bulletin boards for propaganda, recruitment and communication purposes. This alternative side of the Web, which we call the Dark Web, could be analyzed to enable better understanding and analysis of the terrorism phenomena. However, due to problems such as information overload and language barrier, there has been no general methodology developed for collecting and analyzing Dark Web information. To address these problems, we developed a Web-based knowledge portal, called the Dark Web Portal, to support the discovery and analysis of Dark Web information. Specifically, the Dark Web Portal integrates terrorist-generated multilingual datasets on the Web and uses them to study advanced and new methodologies for predictive modeling, terrorist (social) network analysis, and visualization of terrorists’ activities, linkages, and relationships.