Profiling Cyber Crimes from News Portals using Web Scraping

Abstract

In the past few years and especially during the pandemic period everything is going online. Everyone is connected through the internet. With this rapid surge, cybercrimes are also skyrocketing. The government has made efforts to cope with situation but that is not enough. India faced a loss of more than Rs.1.25 trillion($16 billion USD) due to cybercrimes. Online news are a reliable source of information which are always up to date and freely available. In this paper, we conduct a survey of web scraping related previous works. Web scraping is a method to gather information from websites. With this knowledge we have proposed a system of web scraping where we gather cybercrime related news articles. From this data we can classify the crimes into their respective categories according to their regions and time period. This can help law enforcement and also create awareness amongst common people.