This short treatise is part of the “SpringerBriefs in Cybersecurity” series. The briefs in this series are either topic focused, like this book, or country focused. As the title suggests, the book focuses on deviant behavior across numerous social media platforms, offers methods to potentially identify media ownership, and provides several examples of forensic work to identify ownership. It is organized in five chapters.

Chapter 1, “Deviance in Social Media,” defines deviant behaviors and presents a literature review of online deviant groups such as ISIS, anti-NATO propagandists, deviant hackers, and Internet trolls. Online deviant events are defined and illustrated, and the use of bots as tactical tools of influence is discussed. Particular attention is paid to deviant cyber flash mobs. A behavioral framework, taken from Coleman [1], is discussed and applied to the cyber flash mob.

Chapter 2, “Social Network Measures and Analysis,” introduces Euler’s graph theory and applies it to social network analysis (SNA). Centrality, cluster, and modularity measures for social networks are presented. Influential blogs and bloggers are discussed in the framework of SNA. Focal structure analysis (FSA) algorithms used to discover influential nodes in a network or graph are described.

Chapter 3, “Tools and Methodology for Data Collection, Analysis, and Visualization,” describes 13 data tools that can be used to address data from open-source information (OSINF), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, and other sources. These tools include TouchGraph SEO Browser, Twitter Archiving Google Sheet (TAGS) and TAGSExplorer, NodeXL, Gephi, Cytoscape, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), Organizational Risk Analyzer (ORA) NetScenes, IBM Watson Analytics, Web Content Extractor (WCE), Blogtrackers, YouTube Tracker, Botometer, and Reaper, a social media scraping tool.

Chapter 4, “Social Cyber Forensics (SCF): Uncovering Hidden Relationships,” presents Maltego, a tool that can be used to examine cross-media affiliations and uncover relations between organized deviant groups. It introduces a three-step methodology that can uncover Twitter account relationships with other web and blog sites and link likely ownership of these sites. The reader is introduced to methodologies to extract open-source information, find related sites via web tracker codes, find blog sites from Twitter handles, and assess ownership and links among different sites. Several exercises are presented.

Chapter 5, “Case Studies of Deviance in Social Media,” provides four case studies. First, the 2014 Crimean water crisis is presented. This is followed by two exercises related to anti-NATO propaganda and an exercise on ISIS propaganda.

This well-written book is presented in a sequential fashion. Readers with a little knowledge of cybersecurity and cyber forensics will find it very readable. As with other Springer publications, the chapter references are excellent and can help readers further their understanding. The book should interest managers of social media sites and blog writers, as well as readers with an interest in the social influence of the current slate of popular media sites.

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