Identification of Chinese dark jargons in Telegram underground markets using context-oriented and linguistic features

Abstract

When cybercriminals communicate with their customers in underground markets, they tend to use secure and customizable instant messaging (IM) software, i.e. Telegram. It is a popular IM software with over 700 million monthly active users (MAU) up to June 2022. In recent years, more and more dark jargons (i.e. an innocent-looking replacement of sensitive terms) appear frequently on Telegram. Therefore, jargons identification is one of the most significant research perspectives to track online underground markets and cybercrimes. This paper proposes a novel Chinese Jargons Identification Framework (CJI-Framework) to identify dark jargons. Firstly, we collect chat history from Telegram groups that are related to the underground market and construct the corpus TUMCC (Telegram Underground Market Chinese Corpus), which is the first Chinese corpus in jargons identification research field. Secondly, we extract seven brand-new features which can be classified into three categories: Vectors-based Features (VF), Lexical analysis-based Features (LF), and Dictionary analysis-based Features (DF), to identify Chinese dark jargons from commonly-used words. Based on these features, we then run a statistical outlier detection to decide whether a word is a jargon. Furthermore, we employ a word vector projection method and a transfer learning method to improve the effect of the framework. Experimental results show that CJI-Framework achieves a remarkable performance with an F1-score of 89.66%. After adaptation for English, it performs better than state-of-the-art English jargons identification method as well. Our built corpus and code have been publicly released to facilitate the reproduction and extension of our work.