Towards risk based prevention of grooming attacks

The increasing incidents of children sexual exploitation through cyberspace demand for proper protection with technological defense mechanisms. This paper aims to present and evaluate methods and tools that are appropriate towards the prevention of child sexual abuse through Internet based communications. Attacking categories and strategies that predators follow are analyzed and modeled. Moreover, a comparative review of existing risk modeling methods, which is based on a set of proposed criteria, is presented. This comparison results in the conclusion that only two of the reviewed risk modeling methods can be adapted on the intended grooming attack detection system: Bayesian and Markovian. The proposed approach is concluded with a discussion on particular methods and tools for accurate attack probability calculation.