A new artificial intelligence model developed by S2W has gone viral in the global technology industry, swamping social media with its potential to deter cybercrimes. As an example of using AI for good purposes, this latest accomplishment is expected to empower cybersecurity professionals and international law enforcement to detect criminal activities on the dark web at a much quicker pace and with enhanced accuracy. 

AI team, S2W and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) conducted joint research to develop an AI model which can understand the language used by cybercriminals on the dark web. The dark web, a vast space of the internet that is not accessible through general web search engines, has been overflowing with jargon cybercriminals use to sidetrack investigators when trading illegal content, such as drugs and counterfeit credit cards.

For example, “Philipp Plein” normally refers to German fashion designer and his brand while the same term is used on the dark web to indicate a particular type of drug. This deceptive practice of communication has added one more layer to masking criminals, raising hurdles for law enforcement to detect criminal activities in their early stages.

The newly introduced model is designed to interpret this kind of jargon by utilizing BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers), a language model released by Google in 2018. BERT works in a similar way to GPT but predicts middle words, while GPT operates by forecasting upcoming words. In other words, BERT is specialized in identifying certain words in a specific context, like on the dark web, while GPT proceeds from left to right, generating the next words. The researchers later named the model “DarkBERT,” a compound word of the dark web and BERT.

On social media, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, there are currently hundreds of postings related to DarkBERT, rapidly spreading among the global tech community within just a week. Tech influencers who have more than 100,000 followers, some followed by 250,000 users, shared their excitement regarding the latest AI model. Aditya Varma (@varmaaditya) wrote on his LinkedIn feed that “the creation of DarkBERT marks a significant milestone in the ongoing battle against cybercriminals who exploit the hidden realms of the dark web.” A YouTube video, along with dozens of news articles, has been published on the internet, describing what DarkBERT is. 

If you want to know more about DarkBERT, take a look demo videos comparing DarkBERT with OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard.