06-09, 09:30–09:50 (Europe/Vilnius), Panel Room II - II-232
The technological developments of the last decades have granted citizens worldwide access to the Internet, including in handheld devices. Consequently, anyone virtually anywhere can post, share or comment on anything at any time. This possibility, which has given citizens freedom of choice, has also exposed them to more cybernetic attacks, while for criminals new opportunities for cybercriminal practice emerged. The latter practice has gained special visibility recently, due to the covid-19 pandemic, which demanded a world on lockdown to be connected technologically. As a result of the perceived increase of cyberattacks, Law Enforcement is faced with two major challenges: firstly, the higher the volume of cyberattacks, the harder it is for Law Enforcement to dedicate the necessary resources, including human, to fight them; secondly, and importantly, the range of sophisticated stealth technologies that can be used by cybercriminals to help them remain anonymous online seriously hamper the work of Law Enforcement. This paper builds upon research presented at the CEPOL 2017 Research and Science Conference to claim that, despite their anonymisation efforts, in a significant proportion of crimes cybercriminals use language to communicate, and since that use of language is idiosyncratic (i.e., since each speaker of language makes a particular use of the language that they speak and write (Coulthard 2004)), cybercriminals can be positively identified by the language that they use. This identification is made possible by Forensic Linguistics, which can be broadly defined as the application of linguistic analyses in legal or Law Enforcement contexts. This research presents two illustrative cases of cybercrime to show the potential of the forensic linguistic analysis. The first is the case of an anonymous set of text messages spreading defamatory contents, whose linguistic analysis enabled the sociolinguistic profiling of the author, and hence narrow down the pool of suspects. The second presents a cross border cybercriminal practice: fraudulent and deceptive messages sent to citizens for purposes of extortion. The potential of the linguistic analyses conducted in these cases, as well as other applications to uncover cybercriminal activities, will be discussed. The presentation concludes by making recommendations for Law Enforcement.
Rui Sousa-Silva is assistant professor of the Faculty of Arts and researcher at the Linguistics Centre (CLUP) of the University of Porto, where he conducts his research into Forensic Linguistics, especially in the areas of authorship analysis, plagiarism detection and analysis and cybercrime. He has a first degree in Translation and a Masters in Terminology and Translation, both awared by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Aston University (Birmingham, UK), where he submitted his thesis on Forensic Linguistics. He has also authored and co-authored several articles on (computational) authorship analysis, plagiarism detection and analysis of cibercriminal communications. He is co-editor of the international bilingual journal Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito (with Malcolm Coulthard) and of the 2nd edition of 'The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics', published by Routledge (with Malcolm Coulthard and Alison May). He is chair of the 'Computational Linguistics' working group of the COST Action LITHME - Language in the Human-Machine Era.