Pastrana Portillo, SergioHutchings, AliceCaines, AndrewButtery, Paula2022-03-152022-03-152018-09-10Pastrana S., Hutchings A., Caines A., Buttery P. (2018) Characterizing Eve: Analysing Cybercrime Actors in a Large Underground Forum. In: Bailey M., Holz T., Stamatogiannakis M., Ioannidis S. (eds) Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses. RAID 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11050. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00470-5_10978-3-030-00469-9https://hdl.handle.net/10016/34373Underground forums contain many thousands of active users, but the vast majority will be involved, at most, in minor levels of deviance. The number who engage in serious criminal activity is small. That being said, underground forums have played a significant role in several recent high-profile cybercrime activities. In this work we apply data science approaches to understand criminal pathways and characterize key actors related to illegal activity in one of the largest and longest-running underground forums. We combine the results of a logistic regression model with k-means clustering and social network analysis, verifying the findings using topic analysis. We identify variables relating to forum activity that predict the likelihood a user will become an actor of interest to law enforcement, and would therefore benefit the most from intervention. This work provides the first step towards identifying ways to deter the involvement of young people away from a career in cybercrime.eng© 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AGcybercrimeunderground forumssocial behaviorcriminal pathwaysconference outputInformáticahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00470-5_10open access207227Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses 21st International Symposium, RAID 2018, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 10-12, 2018, Proceedings11050CC/0000029631