In the context of preventing and fighting crime, the analysis of mobile phone traffic, among actors of a criminal network, is helpful in order to reconstruct illegal activities on the basis of the relationships connecting those specific individuals. Thus, forensic analysts and investigators require new advanced tools and techniques which allow them to manage these data in a meaningful and efficient way. In this paper we present LogAnalysis, a tool we developed to provide visual data representation and filtering, statistical analysis features and the possibility of a temporal analysis of mobile phone activities. Its adoption may help in unveiling the structure of a criminal network and the roles and dynamics of communications among its components. Using LogAnalysis, forensic investigators could deeply understand hierarchies within criminal organizations, for e.g., discovering central members who provide connections among different sub-groups, etc. Moreover, by analyzing the temporal evolution of the contacts among individuals, or by focusing on specific time windows they could acquire additional insights on the data they are analyzing. Finally, we put into evidence how the adoption of LogAnalysis may be crucial to solve real cases, providing as example a number of case studies inspired by real forensic investigations led by one of the authors.
As an example of the various general-purpose tools for analyzing social networks (differently from tools specifically designed to investigate telecom networks), we mention NodeXL @cite_8 , an extensible toolkit for network overview, discovery and exploration implemented as an add-on to the Microsoft Excel 2007 2010 spreadsheet. NodeXL is open source and was designed to facilitate learning the concepts and methods of Social Network Analysis with visualization as a key component. It integrates metrics, statistical methods, and visualization to gain the benefit of all the three approaches. As for the usage of network metrics to assess the importance of actors in the network, NodeXL shares a paradigm similar to that we adopted in , although it lacks of all the relevant features of our tools related to the temporal analysis of the networks.
@cite_8
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We present NodeXL, an extendible toolkit for network overview, discovery and exploration implemented as an add-in to the Microsoft Excel 2007 spreadsheet software. We demonstrate NodeXL data analysis and visualization features with a social media data sample drawn from an enterprise intranet social network. A sequence of NodeXL operations from data import to computation of network statistics and refinement of network visualization through sorting, filtering, and clustering functions is described. These operations reveal sociologically relevant differences in the patterns of interconnection among employee participants in the social media space. The tool and method can be broadly applied.