Approaches to analyze cyber terrorist communities: Survey and challenges

Cyber terrorism has become a major threat to world peace and global economic prosperity. The exponential growth of cyber terrorist communities has given rise to the need for the development of effective approaches, techniques, and tools to gain in-depth understanding of the ecosystem of these communities (specifically, in terms of inner structure, working strategies, and operation tactics). In the literature, numerous research works on the detection and analysis of cyber terrorist communities have been conducted. More notably, Social Networks Analysis (SNA) has emerged to be a key research field that attempts to analyze such cyber terrorist communities. In this paper, we survey, study, and classify the main approaches related to the analysis of cyber terrorist communities. We also discuss their characteristics, strengths and limitations. The approaches have been categorized into two main categories, namely, SNA based approaches and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, we identify areas that entail further research works with the aim of devising and developing more effective approaches that aid in analyzing cyber terrorist communities.