How technology can mitigate and counteract cyber-stalking and online grooming

Abstract

With the virtual world becoming part of the social lives of adults and minors alike, new attack vectors emerged to increase the severity of human-related attacks to a level the community have not experience before. This article investigates and shares an outline on how technology could emerge further to counteract and mitigate the damage caused by online perpetrators. The review encourages approaching online harassment, stalking, bullying, grooming and their likes with an Incident Response methodology in mind. This includes a detection phase utilising automated methods to identify and classify such attacks, conduct digital forensic investigations to analyse the nature of the offence and reserve evidence, taking preventive measures as part of the reaction towards the problem such as filtering unwanted communications and finally looking at how we can rely on applicable computing to support and educate the victims.