How Cutting Edge Technologies
Support the fight against terrorist financing
October 2023
CERTH Team
In a world where digital transactions and financial activities have grown increasingly complex, and as the landscape of cyber security evolves exponentially, the need to stay ahead of emerging threats is paramount. That’s where the Cut the Cord (CTC) project comes into play, offering a suite of powerful tools aimed at enhancing security and combating financial crimes. The CTC project recognizes the vital role of these technologies in unveiling, analyzing, and dismantling illicit financial networks, thus combating the complex landscape of terrorism financing.
CERTH, a critical partner in the CTC project, has been instrumental in playing a pivotal role in the CTC project, providing advanced technological tools that are essential in the fight against terrorist financing. All developed tools adhere to the highest standards of research integrity,being fully aligned with the existing legal and ethical framework on a national, EU and international level. The significance of these advanced technologies cannot be overstated; they empower investigators and analysts to navigate the intricate landscape of digital transactions and financial activities with unparalleled precision and efficiency. By delving into the world of content analysis, social network analysis, pattern recognition, and cross-modal correlation, we gain insight into how these cutting-edge tools play a pivotal role in safeguarding our digital realm.
The online realm poses unique challenges during financial investigations. Monitored areas include the surface and dark web, where investigators aim to discover relevant suspicious links and hidden services. As part of the CTC pipeline, the Content Acquisition Tool (CAT) streamlines the discovery and extraction of content relevant to counter-terrorism and counter-financing of terrorism efforts. It employs web and social media crawlers to extract text-based content from various online resources, unveiling darknet links and connections to online marketplaces.
Once suspicious financial activities are identified, the Multilingual Text Analysis Module (MTAM) takes center stage. The objective is to extract essential information from a continually updated collection of resources spanning social media, surface, deep, and dark web. The module employs multilingual information extraction, automatic topic modeling, and user-defined topic classification to identify illicit activities and funding sources. It processes data in more than 11 languages, including code-mixing, extracts social identifiers, and identifies blockchain addresses from four different cryptocurrencies.
In the investigation of terrorism financing, uncovering potential networks of interest is crucial. The Social Network Analysis Module (SNAM) applies Social Network Analysis techniques to reveal the social structure of financial transactions and network structures of digital currencies. More specifically, SNAM partitions the different network members into disjoint communities based on the magnitude and frequency of their interactions. Subsequently, each community is analyzed separately so that key actors (influential users) are identified through relevant sophisticated measures. By identifying user groups based on interactions and key actors with influence, SNAM enhances the understanding of fund flows and transaction patterns.
AI-based pattern recognition of terrorist and criminal activities tool (AIBPRT) focuses on pattern detection in traditional finance and cryptocurrency transactions with an emphasis on terrorist financing. It leverages machine learning to detect and identify patterns of suspicious events, using time-evolving graph neural network architecture and time-series analysis. The model integrates data from various sources, such as traditional financing, cryptocurrency transactions, and web monitoring, to identify specific entities and information related to suspicious activities.
The financing of terrorist acts forms an intricate web of interrelated interactions involving various methods, including conventional banking services and cryptocurrencies, underscores the necessity of exposing irregular patterns and integrating diverse information sources. The Cross Modal Correlation Module (CMCM) allows the combination of different modalities to pinpoint time instances that exhibit irregular transaction activity. The analysis enables the identification of potential relationships between time instances and event incidents that could have triggered the changes observed in the transaction activity. Overall, the developed module serves as a digital forensics tool that provides a comprehensive overview of the transaction activity, indicating time instances linked to event occurrences that could be further investigated to identify possible trends and patterns related to illicit actions.
In conclusion, the Cut the Cord (CTC) project stands as a beacon of progress in the relentless fight against terrorist financing and financial crimes. At its core, this initiative harnesses the power of cutting-edge technologies, transforming them into indispensable instruments in our ongoing quest for a more secure digital world. Among these technologies, content analysis, social network analysis, pattern recognition, and cross-modal correlation take center stage, driving the project’s success.
We invite you to delve deeper into the CTC project, exploring its website and engaging with our vibrant social media channels. Discover the remarkable work being done by dedicated individuals and organizations, united in a common purpose – to safeguard our digital world and protect it from the threats of terrorism financing. Together, we can continue to advance the fight against these illicit activities, ensuring that the digital realm remains a safe and secure space for all, now and in the future.
For more information about the project, please visit: https://ctc-project.eu/. You can also join the CTC Stakeholder Community by signing up in the following link: https://ctc-project.eu/community-signup/.
