Mining criminal networks from unstructured text documents

Digital data collected for forensics analysis often contain valuable information about the suspects' social networks. However, most collected records are in the form of unstructured textual data, such as e-mails, chat messages, and text documents. An investigator often has to manually extract the useful information from the text and then enter the important pieces into a structured database for further investigation by using various criminal network analysis tools. Obviously, this information extraction process is tedious and error-prone. Moreover, the quality of the analysis varies by the experience and expertise of the investigator. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to discover criminal networks from a collection of text documents obtained from a suspect's machine, extract useful information for investigation, and then visualize the suspect's criminal network. Furthermore, we present a hypothesis generation approach to identify potential indirect relationships among the members in the identified networks. We evaluated the effectiveness and performance of the method on a real-life cybercrimine case and some other datasets. The proposed method, together with the implemented software tool, has received positive feedback from the digital forensics team of a law enforcement unit in Canada. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.