Hacker's Paradise: Analysing Music in a Cybercrime Forum

Underground cybercrime forums have numerous discussion boards where users interact with each other. The majority of the topics revolve around technology, but a substantial number also discuss everyday topics and interests, including music. The aim of this research is to analyse the musical content posted on a large English-language underground forum to understand what types of musical content is shared, if the lyrics glamorise cybercrime, and if those who post musical content also post more about criminal activity. We find little evidence of the glamorisation of cybercrime. However, lyrics often depict a ‘gangster’ lifestyle, including the promotion of violence. We find that users who post on music boards post significantly less criminal content elsewhere on the forum, however when broken down by crime type they are significantly more likely to post about eWhoring and trading credentials than other forum users. We evaluate the performance of Google's Perspective API in detecting toxic content in music lyrics. We find the toxicity classifier was able to detect toxic speech to an extent, but was not particularly reliable. In exploring this further, we find a bug, in that the classifier only takes the first 501 characters as input, providing a way to evade the detection of toxic content. Content Warning: This research paper contains example forum posts, which contain graphic/explicit language that some readers might find upsetting. Please contact the author if you would prefer to read the article with toxic content removed.