Crowdsourcing Cybercrimes in Pakistan through Online Resources

Abstract

Crowdsourcing refers as a practice of engaging a group of people for a common goal powered by enhanced technologies and social media. As millions of events happens every second of day, it’s not possible for journalists to cover all of them. In context of Journalism, crowdsourcing, nowadays, provide a platform for general public to act and communicate thus improving their coverage. Cybercrime is defined as aggressive, intentional act performed through electronic communications. In recent years, there is intense increase in racism, sexism and other types of aggressive cyber threats. As Pakistan is in list of fastest growing Internet-using countries, ultimately increasing the need to tackle cybercrimes. Confronting cybercrimes therefore requires development of robust detection method in unsupervised manner. The focus of this research is to propose a model for detection of cyber offences in Pakistan reported through news articles and blogs. The first step is to compile existing cybercrime detection methods and perform comparative analysis of methods along with their weaknesses. Comparative analysis will assist in proposing a model for cybercrimes detection through electronic media. Further, in order to analyze authenticity of these news attained via news articles/blogs, source verification process is performed on acquired data by selecting various authenticity parameters and assigning weightages to these parameters.