Covert Network Construction, Disruption, and Resilience: A Survey

Abstract

Covert networks refer to criminal organizations that operate outside the boundaries of the law; they can be mainly classified as terrorist networks and criminal networks. We consider how Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to analyze such networks in order to attain a greater knowledge of criminal behavior. In fact, SNA allows examining the network structure and functioning by computing relevant metrics and parameters to identify roles, positions, features, and other network functioning that are not otherwise easily discovered at first glance. This is why Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) are showing growing interest in SNA, which is also used to identify weak spots and disrupt criminal groups. This paper provides a literature review and a classification of methods and real-case applications of disruption techniques. It considers covert network adaptability to such dismantling attempts, herein referred to as resilience. Critical problems of SNA in criminal studies are discussed, including data collection techniques and the inevitable incompleteness and biases of real-world datasets, with the aim of promoting a new research stream for both dismantling techniques and data collection issues.

Human and Social Capital Strategies for Mafia Network Disruption

“…Therefore, if a soldier is arrested, he can easily be replaced by another one. The Sicilian Mafia is in fact extremely resilient against disruption precisely for its capacity to regenerate and rearrange the top positions [25].…”

“…In [25], we provided a literature review of the most significant works on covert network disruption. We underlined how disruption strategies based on human or social capitals are usually developed in a parallel fashion and exploit very different techniques.…”

What Are They Doing in the Dark?

“…By categorizing police work in Tor cases in four layers, we give an overview of police work in Tor cases, but this categorization can thus be seen as a more general representation of how the police deal with (cyber)crime. Although the working methods are not completely new, as all the methods also find their place in earlier research (Collier et al, 2022;Ficara et al, 2022;Sebagh et al, 2022), Tor clearly influences the way those strategies and working methods are being used and given shape. The main difficulty; absent and anonymous suspects or victims whose locations and identities are effectively hidden behind encryption forces the police to revise their way of policing.…”

Exploring the landscape of community-based dismantling strategies

“…Different ranking criteria have been proposed to maximize the efficiency of network dismantling, focusing on the detection of the most influential nodes to remove [4][5][6][7], or adopting holistic approaches that focus on the collective, emergent features of complex networks [8][9][10][11]. Due to its flexibility, network dismantling has been applied to different domains, ranging from biology [12] to socio-technical systems [13,14] and crime [15,16].…”