European Identity THeft Observatory System

In recent years, Online Identity Theft (OIDT) related frauds have increased at an extremely fast pace. On one hand, our use of – and dependence on – online platforms is growing, and spans a wide spectrum of personal and professional endeavours. These include video calls, social media, e-banking, online consumer services, education, and entertainment, among others. On the other, technological advances have given rise to a number of tools, ranging from the simple to the sophisticated, that can help criminals fool their victims: keyloggers, phishing, deepfakes, and many more.

EITHOS will develop a novel Identity Theft Observatory System, empowering European citizens, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), and policymakers to further contribute to the prevention, detection, investigation, and mitigation of OIDT, related crimes, and societal impact. It will provide a common gateway based on two pillars:

1. Inform & Educate European citizens through the observatory itself and via innovative awareness campaigns, regarding the safety of their personal data and identity;

2. Identify & Αddress the challenges that Police Authorities face against OIDT and develop a robust software toolset for detecting fake media to support them and enhance their investigations.

By the end of the first year of the project, EITHOS has achieved the following main objectives:

1. Legal and ethical research regarding aimed to aid partners identifying the relevant principles and laws to assess, anticipate, and mitigate the research risks.
2. Socio-psychological impact and support on victim of OIDT background research and preparation of in-depth structured interviews with victims and semi-structured interviews with experts and professionals.
3. First round of consortium workshop between LEAs and technical partners to define the system requirements for the development and deployment of the EITHOS toolset, through direct communication and MosCoW methodology-based questionnaires.
4. Research and first stages of development of the EITHOS toolset for audio and video deepfake detection, social networks botnet detection and OIDT related structured knowledge extraction.
5. Integration planning for the development and integration of the toolset in the EITHOS Observatory for LEAs.
6. Development and integration of the EITHOS observatory for Citizens.

By the end of the first year of the project, EITHOS has started different threads of research which are all ongoing and will be completed until the end of the project. Specifically, the project has been focused on contributing to the state of the art through the following tasks:

1. Defining of the grounds for the legal and ethical soundness of the research activities performed in EITHOS.
2. Understanding of the main socio-psychological factors that influence online identity theft. Monitoring of key online communities supporting victims. Gathering expert evidence on coping with online identity theft.
3. Designing and training of a new video deepfake detection machine learning algorithm.
4. Designing, training and evaluation of an initial audio deepfake detection tool on publich databases in general languages (English, Chinese).
5. Designing an innovative framework that detects fake social networks profiles by tackling different data and adapting their combination depending on the context has been established.
6. Designing of an initial pipeline of modules for Knowledge extraction. A first version of crawling and knowledge extraction has been tested preliminary. Research is ongoing in improving crawling, knowledge extraction and visualization possibilities to obtain the best results for the project.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EITHOS (European Identity THeft Observatory System)

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