Biblio

Hacker forums and other social platforms may contain vital information about cyber security threats. But using manual analysis to extract relevant threat information from these sources is a time consuming and error-prone process that requires a significant allocation of resources. In this paper, we explore the potential of Machine Learning methods to rapidly sift through hacker forums for relevant threat intelligence. Utilizing text data from a real hacker forum, we compared the text classification performance of Convolutional Neural Network methods against more traditional Machine Learning approaches. We found that traditional machine learning methods, such as Support Vector Machines, can yield high levels of performance that are on par with Convolutional Neural Network algorithms.