Visible to the public Identifying digital threats in a hacker web forum

TitleIdentifying digital threats in a hacker web forum
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsMacdonald, M., Frank, R., Mei, J., Monk, B.
Conference Name2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
Date Publishedaug
Keywordsautomated analysis tools, communication platform, Computer crime, Computer hacking, critical computer networks, critical infrastructure, critical infrastructures, customized Web-crawler, cyber-attacks, data mining, data querying, data systems, Databases, digital threat identification, Discussion forums, discussion posts, hacker language analysis, hacker Web forum, Hacking, HTML, Internet, malicious hackers, natural language processing, parts of speech tagger, pubcrawl170109, query processing, sentiment analysis, sentiment analysis tool, Social network services
Abstract

Information threatening the security of critical infrastructures are exchanged over the Internet through communication platforms, such as online discussion forums. This information can be used by malicious hackers to attack critical computer networks and data systems. Much of the literature on the hacking of critical infrastructure has focused on developing typologies of cyber-attacks, but has not examined the communication activities of the actors involved. To address this gap in the literature, the language of hackers was analyzed to identify potential threats against critical infrastructures using automated analysis tools. First, discussion posts were collected from a selected hacker forum using a customized web-crawler. Posts were analyzed using a parts of speech tagger, which helped determine a list of keywords used to query the data. Next, a sentiment analysis tool scored these keywords, which were then analyzed to determine the effectiveness of this method.

DOI10.1145/2808797.2808878
Citation Keymacdonald_identifying_2015