Said Varlioglu

Mustafa Sagir, Said Varlioglu

Previous studies have offered a variety of explanations on the relationship between democracy and the internet. However, most of these studies concentrate on regions, specific states or authoritarian regimes. No study has investigated the influence of the internet in partly free countries defined by the Freedom House. Moreover, very little is known about the effects of online censorship on the development, stagnation, or decline of democracy. Drawing upon the International Telecommunication Union, Freedom House, and World Bank databases and using machine learning methods, this study sheds new light on the effects of the internet on democratization in partly free countries. The findings suggest that internet penetration and online censorship both have a negative impact on democracy scores and the internet's effect on democracy scores is conditioned by online censorship. Moreover, results from random forest suggest that online censorship is the most important variable followed by governance index and education on democracy scores. The comparison of the various machine learning models reveals that the best predicting model is the 175-tree random forest model which has 92% accuracy. Also, this study might help "IT professionals" to see their important role not only in the technical fields but also in society in terms of democratization and how close IT is to social sciences.

Victor Adewopo, Bilal Gonen, Said Varlioglu et al.

The availability of sophisticated technologies and methods of perpetrating criminogenic activities in the cyberspace is a pertinent societal problem. Darknet is an encrypted network technology that uses the internet infrastructure and can only be accessed using special network configuration and software tools to access its contents which are not indexed by search engines. Over the years darknets traditionally are used for criminogenic activities and famously acclaimed to promote cybercrime, procurements of illegal drugs, arms deals, and cryptocurrency markets. In countries with oppressive regimes, censorship of digital communications, and strict policies prompted journalists and freedom fighters to seek freedom using darknet technologies anonymously while others simply exploit it for illegal activities. Recently, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence augmented a tool that can be used to expose illegal activities behind the darknet. We studied relevant literature reviews to help researchers to better understand the darknet technologies, identify future areas of research on the darknet and ultimately to optimize how data-driven insights can be utilized to support governmental agencies in unraveling the depths of darknet technologies. This paper focuses on the use of the internet for crimes, deanonymization of TOR-services, darknet a new digital street for illicit drugs, research questions and hypothesis to guide researchers in further studies. Finally, in this study, we propose a model to examine and investigate anonymous online illicit markets.

Murat Ozer, Said Varlioglu, Bilal Gonen et al.

Over the past three years, especially following WannaCry malware, ransomware has become one of the biggest concerns for private businesses, state, and local government agencies. According to Homeland Security statistics, 1.5 million ransomware attacks have occurred per year since 2016. Cybercriminals often use creative methods to inject their malware into the target machines and use sophisticated cryptographic techniques to hold hostage victims' files and programs unless a certain amount of equivalent Bitcoin is paid. The return to the cybercriminals is so high (estimated \$1 billion in 2019) without any cost because of the advanced anonymity provided by cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin \cite{Paquet-Clouston2019}. Given this context, this study first discusses the current state of ransomware, detection, and prevention systems. Second, we propose a global ransomware center to better manage our concerted efforts against cybercriminals. The policy implications of the proposed study are discussed in the conclusion section.