Winner
In June 2022 we announced the International Cybercrime Research Summer Award 2022. The competition was for students of all the world to do research on the leaked Conti files using knowledge of criminology and computer science. See original announcement here.
After evaluating all the works sent by the candidates, at the end of the September 2022, the winner was selected! The award and money prize was given to Estelle Ruellan a master student of criminology from the Université de Montréal, Canada!
Details of the work
Estelle worked on the Conti files by leveraging the English translations of the chat, and using machine learning algorithms to uncover insights on the organization of the Conti criminal group. More precisely, she illustrated how to train well established and straightforward machine learning methods, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), coupled with visualization strategies (using WordCloud and pyLDAvis), to determine the main working positions of Conti members.
NLP was used to analyse the chat logs and find the words that represent certain topics. Later the topics were filtered and clustered, so that very specific profiles of users were identified. These profiles correspond to the common positions of workers in the cybercrime group, such as managers, developers, etc.
Therefore, Estelle show that ML models can automate the recognition of positions of cybercrime group members by looking at what they are chatting about.
Given that the work was comprehensive enough, we decided to publish it as a research paper, which was already accepted for Botconf Conference 2023! So congratulations Estelle!
We want to congratulate Estelle on her good work putting together knowledge of criminology and computer science to win the award! Well done Estelle and thanks for participating!