Influence of COVID-19 Epidemic on Dark Web Contents

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, authors studied and analyzed Dark Webs, as well as the influence of COVID-19. Authors propose a Dark Web Enhanced Analysis(DWEA) method to analyze data characteristics related to content accessed on the Dark Web and to identify the influence of recent global events, such as COVID-19. Authors provided plenty of background introduction and state-of-art research, clearly explained and analyzed the system model, and set up plenty of experiments. The experimental results demonstrated the advantage of the proposed method, especially through comparisons.  However, since the paper aims to show the influence of COVID-19, it makes more sense if authors provide comparisons with data before the pandemic. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper deals with an exciting topic. The article has been read carefully, and some crucial issues have been highlighted in order to be considered by the author(s).

All the acronyms should be defined and explained first before using them such that they become evident for the readers.

The Introduction and related work parts give valuable information for the readers as well as researchers. 

In addition recent papers should be added in the part of related work.

Representation of figures needs to be improved.

It would be good if DDoS security domains [1], such as Intrusion tolerant system, would be reflected in future research or related work.

[1] Kwon, Hyun, Yongchul Kim, Hyunsoo Yoon, and Daeseon Choi. "Optimal cluster expansion-based intrusion tolerant system to prevent denial of service attacks." Applied Sciences 7, no. 11 (2017): 1186.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper is worth for acceptance.