Tracking Hackers with NLP and Machine Learning

…Cybercrime researchers and law enforcement need to broadly understand the scale and scope of the activity on these underground markets, but it takes a long time for human analysts to peruse entire forums. To expedite this process, a multi-university team of researchers including Damon McCoy, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU [Tandon School of Engineering], has developed new natural language processing tools that can be trained on forum-specific data to categorize posts and determine what products are being bought and sold for what prices.