DarkJargon.net: A Platform for Understanding Underground Conversation with Latent Meaning

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Abstract
An essential part of underground conversation are dark jargon terms. They are benign-looking, but have hidden, sometimes sinister meanings and are used by participants of underground forums for illicit behavior. For example, the dark term "rat" is often used in lieu of "Remote Access Trojan". We present a novel online platform that caters to the understating of underground conversation with latent meaning. Our system enables researchers, law enforcement agents and "white-hat" hackers to gain invaluable insights into underground communication by providing them with a tool to (1) look-up dark jargon terms in a dictionary; (2) explore the usage of dark jargon over time and interpret their meaning; (3) collaborate and contribute their own research findings. Furthermore, we introduce a novel dark jargon interpretation method that leverages masked language modeling of a transformer-based architecture.
Funding Information
  • National Science Foundation (1801652)