Autonomic Author Identification in Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Abstract

With the advances in Internet technologies and services, the social media has been gaining excessive popularity, especially because these technologies provide anonymity where they use nicknames to post their messages. Unfortunately, the anonymity feature has been exploited by the cyber-criminals to hide their identities and their operations. Hence, there is a growing interest in cybersecurity research domain to identify the authors of malicious messages and activities. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels are widely used to exchange messages and information among malicious users involved in cybercrimes. In this paper, we present an autonomic author identification technique based on personality profile and analysis of IRC messages. We first monitor the IRC channels using our autonomic bots and then create a personality profile for each targeted author. We demonstrate that personality analysis for author detection/identification is an efficient approach and has high detection rates.