The social network of hackers

Global Crime

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 160-175

  Décary Hétu, David ^a   Dupont, Benoit ^a  

^a UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL   (Canada)

Author keywords

botnet; hackers; organised crime; social network analysis

Indexed keywords

EID: 84865416232     PISSN: 17440572     EISSN: 17440580     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2012.702523     Document Type: Article

References (44)

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8. Ibid., p. 80.
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25. It is common for people who use IRC to change their nicknames frequently, making it very difficult for researchers to keep track of all the nicknames used by hackers. We analysed the distribution of nicknames found in the conversations and merged the nicknames that were nearly identical (ex: Poison and Poison). We also identified the nicknames for bots (computer programs) used by hackers to send commands through IRC and removed them from our sample. (These bots were easily recognisable by the string of numbers appended to their nicknames.) The resulting dataset included 771 individuals. In order to protect their privacy, the online nicknames of the individuals will not be used in this article. We assigned each individual a numeric code (N1, N2, N3, etc.) that is used to identify them in the rest of this article. The police organisation that provided us the dataset also added an additional layer of privacy protection for the people involved in this study (including convicted hackers) by refusing to disclose the real identities behind the nicknames.
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35. Borgatti is the creator of Ucinet, a software package used to study social networks that is very popular among academics. He has recently published an article in Science describing the current state of social networks analysis (Borgatti et al., 2009). His work on the political independence measure has yet to be published.
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37. This software is still not feature-complete according to Borgatti (2010). It has thus never been publicized or promoted by its creator. This does not affect the core functions of the software used for this article, which is available free of charge from Analytic Technologies' website (www.analytictech.com).
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39. The power in this network is held to stem from the ability to provide information and easy access to information.
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