iRENIC

1st International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Investigating and Countering Crime

September 12, 2016, Beijing, China

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Co-located with the 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, 12-16 September 2016 - Beijing, China.

Keynote

Your words betray you: The role of language in cybercrime investigations

Online social media and networks are increasingly utilised in cyber criminal activities. Sophisticated criminals often take steps to avoid revealing critical information about themselves or their activities. This poses significant challenges for legitimate law enforcement activity to protect victims and apprehend criminals. In this talk I will reflect on experiences in two large-scale projects and discuss the challenges of analysing online activities of cyber criminals. I will then highlight how advances in computational analysis of natural language can help overcome these challenges hence providing a new and powerful tool in the arsenal of cybercrime investigators. Both projects have seen real-world deployments, so the talk will cover both scientific value of linguistic analysis in this context and insights from practical experiences in law enforcement settings. I will conclude by discussing the implications for requirements engineering research and the need for a shift in perspective if we, as a community, are to make tangible contributions to tackling cyber crime.

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    Prof. Awais Rashid

      Professor Awais Rashid is director of the cross-disciplinary Security Lancaster research centre.
     His research spans software engineering and cyber security. He is particularly interested in
     security of cyber-physical systems, such as, industrial control systems and Internet of Things.
     He is also a keen researcher of adversarial and non-adversarial behaviours pertaining to cyber
     security. He heads the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at Lancaster, leads a project as part of the UK Research Institute on Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems (RITICS), co-leads the Security and Safety theme within the UK Hub on Cyber Security of Internet of Things (PETRAS) and is a member of the UK Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). His research on cybercrime has had significant impact. For instance, his work on deceptive digital personas was selected as one of the 100 Big Ideas of the Future in a joint report by Research Councils UK/Universities UK (2011), influenced UK and EU policy frameworks and is used in law enforcement applications internationally.