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Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media Platforms and Its Challenges

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-76346-6_54

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 Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media
Platforms and Its Challenges

Afrah Almansoori1,3 , Mohammed Alshamsi2,3 , Sherief Abdallah3 ,

and Said A. Salloum4,5(B)
1 General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology,
Dubai Police G.H.Q, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
2 Information Technology Department, Ministry of Health and Prevention,
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
3 Faculty of Engineering and IT, The British University in Dubai, Dubai, UAE
4 Research Institute of Sciences and Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
ssalloum@sharjah.ac.ae
5 School of Science, Engineering and Environment, University of Salford, Salford, UK

Abstract. Social media is a weapon that is capable of construction as well as

destruction. The real power of the prevailing social media platforms becomes evi-
dent by witnessing the influence created by these platforms on a large scale. It
plays a significant role in everyday life. The rising popularity due to its ability
to make people attached with kith and kin have paved the way for the world to
share photos, feelings, videos, which bears a high-security concern. However, most
social media users do not know the underlying security level(s) of the respective
account(s), including which features of these social media have to be considered if
there is a risky situation. The police are making lots of efforts to curb cybercrime
at its root and reduce the crime rate. This research aims to understand the char-
acteristics of cybercrimes taking place in social media and identify what kind of
efforts the police should take to control cybercrime. Python programming is used
for the analysis, where pre-processing and then percentage analysis is performed
to understand the data. It is seen that uneducated and poor people have more
tendency to commit cybercrimes. Also, the ages between 20 and 25 committed
more crimes. Hence, this would help the police to identify the type of people who
would create more crimes. These results would help the police to narrow down
their search on criminals for better surveillance. The police must focus on those
with these factors while monitoring social media.

Keywords: Social media · Cybercrime · Cybercriminals · Police effort

1 Introduction
The sphere of cyberspace has reached everywhere on the globe [1]. The advancements
in cybersecurity in the fields of technologies, activities, and methods for protecting the
various programs and networks and data associated with computers thereby prevent
attacks by malicious people and/or cybercriminals. The eye-opener is that cybersecurity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

A. E. Hassanien et al. (Eds.): AICV 2021, AISC 1377, pp. 615–625, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76346-6_54
616 A. Almansoori et al.

does not entirely prevent cyberattacks. It is stated that millions of these cyberattacks
could be proliferated onto cyberspace whose analysis would turn up complicated [2].
This posts severe necessity to stay alert on such attackers’ prevalence and protect oneself
or network against such activities where such an awareness alone does not hold any good
an implementation point of view. Online social networks gained popularity tremendously
in recent years. The social media platforms could be explained as “a cluster of Internet-
based applications that team up on the foundations of Web 2.0 which allows creating
and exchanging user-generated content” [3]. Social media platforms have become an
integral part of people’s lives, including but not limited to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook,
Snapchat, Instagram, etc., [4]–[11]. These are highly dependent as they aid in building
social relationships and building strong communities online, which is considered an asset
for further growth of individuals or groups [12]. These web-based platforms render varied
novel opportunities for socializing and interacting with the users that have redefined
the approach of sharing information such as online public based opinions on polls,
news circulation, the successful conduct of online businesses, and/or promotion to a
larger crowd of the audience than the traditional methodologies. People are becoming
obvious targets of cybercriminals through social networks due to such platforms’ system
design. To safeguard social networks, various organizations are constantly increasing
the Information Technology (IT) budgets for protecting these social networks around
the globe [13]. The voluminous amount of data being shared through social media are
collected and analyzed for finding different patterns to get useful insights into the data
[14]. Thus, it is highly essential to follow modern techniques and tools for sealing the
resources and information available online via social networks.

2 Related Work
An analysis of various cyber crimes on Facebook has been performed by [15, 16] by
comparing the website’s penetration in 148 different countries. The analysis has used
Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Tobit, and Quantile-based regressions. The data used
contains details of the population from different regions and their income levels to
identify the link between the crimes and the financial status. The analysis shows that there
is not much correlation between the income status and the crime rates, especially in Arab
regions. However, the correlation was positive in sub-Saharan Africa. The similarities
between conventional crimes and cybercrimes have been compared by [17] by analyzing
the crime rates and their reporting behavior. The data was gathered through a survey
conducted by Dutch research. It is seen that conventional crimes are widely reported in
comparison with cybercrimes. Only high-level cybercrimes are usually reported, while
others are usually ignored. This shows that there are a lot of cybercrimes taking place
which never get recorded and reported.
The link between the different types of crimes has been analyzed by [18]. The analysis
was conducted using Machine learning algorithms on the large data that includes the
data collected from Twitter and police survey data in order to identify the link between
the online hate speeches concerning religion and race and physical crimes taking place.
Similar analysis has also been performed by [19], where the data has been collected from
Twitter messages and analyzed with the region’s physical violence. While the former
 Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media Platforms 617

research analyzed racial and religious messages, the latter analyzed the violence taking
place during sporting events between hockey and basketball fans. Historical data has
also been used for understanding the previous instances of crimes. The research also
shows a high correlation between tweets and violence. The police can monitor these
tweets to predict if any violence will occur in their city. Both these researches have used
spatial data with geotagged tweets to identify the local tweets.

3 Methodology
3.1 Research Questions

This research aims to understand the characteristics of cybercrimes in social media and
identify what kind of efforts the police should take to control cybercrime. The research
strives to answer the following research questions:

• What types of attacks, vulnerabilities, and crimes are taking place in social media?
• What are the demographics of most of the criminals?
• What kind of efforts should the police take to monitor the criminals in social media
and reduce crime?

3.2 Tools Utilized and System Configuration

• This 12 GB RAM.
• Core i3 processor.
• Python 3.7 Jupyter notebook console.

3.3 Libraries Used for Analysis

Python gives various graphing libraries which are packed with a wide range of features
according to user preferences [20]. The library’s excellent support by Python makes it
interesting to create highly specialized and supported plots in Python. The overview of
each plotting libraries are given below for detailed understanding:

• Matplotlib: Renders a wide range of comfort in utilizing it. It contains multiple

functionalities and contains sub-libraries.
• Pandas Visualization: It is built on Matplotlib, which is used for visualization purposes.
Many graphs can be added using this library.
• Seaborn: The styles are of high-level interfacing along with modularity. This library
contains visualizations that are not possible through Pandas.
• Ggplot: It is based upon R’s ggplot2, with the usage of the grammar of graphics. This
contains simple visualizations that do not need complex plotting.
• Plotly: It is used to create interactive plots.
618 A. Almansoori et al.

3.3.1 Seaborn
Seaborn provides a wide range of attractive graphs created on Matplotlib that is consid-
ered a Python data visualization library. Seaborn is used with great flexibilities. Graphs
are created in a single line which is equivalent to ten lines in Matplotlib. The design stan-
dards are highly impressive that go well while working with the panda’s data frames.
Seaborn could be imported by typing the following:
import seaborn as sns.

3.3.2 Matplotlib
The most popular and widely used Python plotting library is the Matplotlib, a low-level
library that could be interfaced with Matlab that renders high degrees of freedom when
it comes to creating larger code. The Matplotlib installation through pip and Conda are
as follows:
Pip install matplotlib or condainstall matplotlib.
Matplotlib is designed for the creation of all the basic graphs such as line chart, bar
chart, histogram, etc., and it could be imported as follows:
Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt.
Both the above-stated libraries have been used for the visualization of the dataset.

3.4 Data
3.4.1 Dataset
The analysis of cybercrime on the social media platforms in the form of offensive threats
was carried out with the help of the social media cyber crime dataset, which consisted of
574 observations [21] (See Appendix A). Each of those observations was a measure for
the suspected person arrested for committing any form of cybercrime on social media
platforms incorporating the background details of these features from the year 2014 to
2018. The following are the background features pertaining to the suspects under control
which are given in Table 1.

Table 1. Features and datatypes in the dataset.

Feature Description Datatype

Year The crime committed by a suspect on a yearly basis Timestamp
Age Age of the suspect Numerical
Cybercrime social media Types of cybercrime(s) committed by the suspect on Categorical
social media
Criminal record Track of criminal record which the suspect Binary
previously committed
Education Educational background of the suspect Binary
Family background Family background of the suspect Categorical
 Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media Platforms 619

3.4.2 Pre-processing of Data

The harassment of cyberspace would consist of worrisome, sexual, emotionally harmful
warning messages that would be rendered through an electronic medium that disrupts
the form of fear or distress, which is no less than physical or real-life harassment. The
data collected are unstructured and noisy, so the following pre-processing techniques
would be employed in order to remove the noisy data. The removal of various punctuation
marks like an ellipsis, quotation mark, apostrophe and or parenthesis, exclamation marks,
commas, periods, question marks will occur at an initial stage. Eliminating stop words
would be the next step where the most frequently used words would be removed as they
would possess low importance while processing the data. The most frequently occurred
words are referred to as stop words.
A lower case converting process will be carried out while analyzing the text that
would treat the upper- and lower-case letters in an equal manner. The feature words
and their sizes get increased when both the lower- and upper-case letters are found
momentarily in the training corpus. The important step of pre-processing is stemming.
It would reduce the word by removing their affixes to save time and space, and the word
would be converted into its base form. The feature selection technique is a major step
where a more relevant feature would be selected from a wide collection of processed
data, thereby reducing the training time, interpreting easily, and improving the accuracy
and performance of the model. The model would perform comparatively well when the
appropriate attributes are selected. The feature selection techniques include the Gini
Index, Information Gain (IG), CHI-test (X2 statistic), Document Frequency (DF), Odds
Ratio, Term Frequency, and Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), and the Mutual
Information (MI). The missing values in the dataset are found by checking for any
missing values in the dataset and giving the inputs for the missing values using mean,
mode, or median. The Outliers in the dataset found and removed by using the box plot
technique where the removed outliers were replaced with the Arithmetic mean values
for the numerical features and Arithmetic mode values for the categorical features.

3.4.3 Exploratory Data Analysis

The Exploratory data analysis is performed for the visualization of each feature in the
dataset. The analysis consists of bar plots, histograms, density distribution plots, compar-
ison plots of two features, etc. From the analysis, the suspect framework’s features that
influence the cybercrime committed in social media could be identified and separated.

4 Results

This section consists of graphs and results, which are performed in the methodology
section by using the exploratory data analysis method. Figure 1 shows the crimes in
social media that have been taken year-wise from 2014 to 2018. Most of the crimes took
place in 2018 with 28.1% of the crimes, followed by 20.1% in 2015. The proportion of
crimes in the other years is 18.3%, 17.5%, and 16.1% in 2017, 2016, and 2014.
Figure 2 shows the different types of crimes taking place in social media. From
the data, 300 instances of fraud were present, followed by around 100 instances of
620 A. Almansoori et al.

Fig. 1. Percentage of crimes committed by the suspects yearly.

child pornography. Other crimes are significantly lower with around 50 cases each for
threatening, criminal harassment, and child lurking.

Fig. 2. Type of cybercrime committed by suspect visualization.

The plot in Fig. 3 represents the previous criminal records of the criminals. It is seen
that most of the criminals have a previous record of criminal history. Out of the total
data, around 70% of them had a previous criminal background, while 30% did not have
any criminal background.
 Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media Platforms 621

Fig. 3. Analysis of criminal record committed by the suspect.

The educational background of the suspects is shown in Fig. 4. Most of the criminals
did not have high education. Around 70% of the criminals did not have any type of
education or only had basic education. 30% of them were graduates.

Fig. 4. Analysis of the educational background of the suspect.

Figure 5 depicts the financial background of criminals. Around 61% of the criminals
were very poor, while the rich and the middle case made up the other 39% population.
622 A. Almansoori et al.

Fig. 5. Family background analysis of suspects.

The data in Fig. 6 is a representation of the distribution of the age of the suspects.
Most of the criminals were between the ages of 20 and 25 with a peak at 22 years. There
are hardly any criminals above the age of 45.

Fig. 6. Distribution of age of suspects.

The analysis of criminal background with educational background throws light upon
the various grey areas in the society that needs immediate addressing to create harmony
in the surroundings, as shown in Fig. 7.
 Analysis of Cybercrime on Social Media Platforms 623

Fig. 7. Criminal background vs. Education background of suspects.

5 Conclusion
Cybercrime must be the primary focus of law enforcement agencies that should provide
sufficient resources for the same. The usage of social media platforms for interacting
with peers and others by billions of users worldwide has captivated the cybercriminals
to spread malicious code, inbox users with spam messages, trying to overcome users’
inherent trust in these platforms on the relationship and behavioral network. Thus, social
media networking platforms’ privacy and security models are recently becoming a major
concern for these users. The online social media sites need to identify the core aspects
of human and social connectivity through the interaction and proper identification of
accurate intuitive and then strong methodologies for ensuring all those essential lev-
els of maintaining privacy, granting protection, and building the trust framework such
tiers. The various governments, along with intelligence services teamed up with highly
skilled and technically strong experts, must be formed to adopt and frame various new
technologies along with the paradigms without disturbing the load should be made. The
amount of data flowing on such networks shall then be analyzed in this manner. In addi-
tion to this, cybersecurity should not be scared about; instead of proper planning and
implementing strategies to tackle the problem should be focused on. The integral part
should be assembled with proper analysis mechanisms from the users at all levels with
proper guidelines from various stakeholders is mandatory. As an individual, the safe
practices on the social media platforms could be made clear to various people who are
using them. Awareness from individuals to individuals will have a greater impact on the
problem. Thus, cybercrime analysis on social media platforms gave a clear picture that
individuals are the strong ties who are uplifting the bigger outlines. Hence, maintaining
security and privacy on such platforms is essential. It is seen that uneducated and poor
people have more tendency to commit cybercrimes. Also, the ages between 20 and 25
commit more crimes. Hence, this would help the police to identify the type of people
who would create more crimes.
624 A. Almansoori et al.

The police must focus on those with these factors while monitoring social media.
While this research has strived to identify the social media cybercrime and the police
efforts to mitigate these crimes, the samples considered are less due to time limitations.
In the future, this project can be expanded into a fully-fledged analysis by using Artificial
Intelligence techniques for the analysis. Also, more data can be considered by merging
data from different police departments, and the analysis can be conducted on a global
scale. The number of factors is limited in this work. Numerous factors affect the criminal
tendency to commit crimes. These factors can be identified in the future, and data may be
collected accordingly. Identification of such factors can help the police to narrow down
the criminals further.

Acknowledgment. This work is a part of a project submitted in fulfillment of MSc Informatics

(Knowledge & Data Management) Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology.
At The British University in Dubai.

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