A Surveillance Framework of Suspicious Browsing Activities on the Internet Using Recommender Systems: A Case Study

Cybercrime activities are increasing all over the world at an alarming rate and pose a serious threat to a nation and its citizens. For this reason, surveillance and monitoring of onlineOnline browsing activities of individuals become necessary to prevent terrorist and criminal activities, in the interests of national securitySecurity. There are at present several such surveillance projects in implementation already in India as well as abroad. The cyber-surveillance tools monitor data stored on hard drives, as well as data transferred over computer networks, such as the InternetInternet through emails, or through mobile phones in the form of calls or messages. In this chapter, we have proposed a sparse matrix-based framework that will track the browsing activities of individuals over a period of time, and if some persons are found to be surfing a chain of websites that are categorized as potentially harmful, for a period of time, then it will raise an alert to the governing authorities. The framework also uses recommender systemsRecommender system and browsing history tracking algorithmsAlgorithm. We expect that this can be of assistance and can be utilized by authorized monitoring agencies of countries as a threat analysis tool.