Coordinated online harassment by collections of individuals and groups is a scourge of the modern Internet. It has upended and cost lives, silenced voices, and is making our public discourse more cruel and less representative. The phenomenon creates challenges for those who seek an equitable, secure and trustworthy internet to reduce the threat of coordinated attacks and handle attacks swiftly and effectively. Using the research team's past experiences with a clinical model that has been useful in helping victims of intimate partner violence, and new understandings of how to handle coordinated harassment to reduce harms and provide active assistance to targets of harassment, this project pilots an advice clinic. To ensure that the work has practical, real world impact, the project is also developing materials and working with platforms, threat intelligence companies, and non-profit organizations that help targets of online harassment .
The project uses a comprehensive set of technical and human-centered methods to advance our understanding of coordinated harassment threats and mitigation techniques. The coordination of harassment allows harassers to scale their attacks, but also provides defenders with an opportunity to monitor attackers. This project will study how threat intelligence---an emerging area of cybersecurity that has enabled the blocking, detecting, and remediation of cyberattacks---can be used to monitor channels where coordinated harassment and doxing campaigns happen, understand escalation processes, identify pain points, and prioritize courses of action for platforms, law enforcement, and targeted individuals. The multidisciplinary team and mixed methods approach will enable the project to not only build sophisticated tools, but also build scientific knowledge in multiple fields and to understand whether and how the proposed tools can contribute solutions to a complex societal problem.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
