The Need for Concerted Efforts for COVID-19 Intelligence Gathering: Medical Espionage and Cyber Crime Trends Analysis to Strengthen the UK's Pandemic Response

An important knowledge gap that needs bridging is the extent to which current natural language processing (NLP) tools, models and resources can be successfully applied to exploring a specific aspect of dark-web data such as COVID-19-related communication.
It is imperative to support law enforcement in gathering intelligence on the new COVID-19-related cybercrime strategies in the DW. The research gap around the DW search and textual analysis consists in the lack of robust mechanisms for querying, processing and monitoring trends on the DW. The critical data sets and computational solutions need to be made available for immediate exploitation and further research to strengthen the UK’s pandemic response.