DISCOVER: Mining Online Chatter for Emerging Cyber Threats

  • Anna Sapienza
  • , Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala
  • , Alessandro Bessi
  • , Kristina Lerman
  • , Emilio Ferrara

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Widespread adoption of networking technologies has brought about tremendous economic and social growth, but also exposed individuals and organization to new threats from malicious cyber actors. Recent attacks by WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware crypto-worms, infected hundreds of thousands of computer systems world wide, compromising data and critical infrastructure. In order to limit their impact, it is, therefore, critical to detect - -and even predict - -cyber attacks before they spread. Here, we introduce DISCOVER, an early cyber threat warning system, that mines online chatter from cyber actors on social media, security blogs, and darkweb forums, to identify words that signal potential cyber attacks. We evaluate DISCOVER and find that it can identify terms related to emerging cyber threats with precision above $80%$. DISCOVER also generates a time line of related online discussions on different Web sources that can be useful for analyzing emerging cyber threats.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Web Conference 2018 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages983-990
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356404
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Apr 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018 - Lyon, France
Duration: 23 Apr 201827 Apr 2018

Publication series

NameThe Web Conference 2018 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2018

Conference

Conference27th International World Wide Web, WWW 2018
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityLyon
Period23/04/1827/04/18

Keywords

  • cyber security
  • cyber threat prediction
  • web mining

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'DISCOVER: Mining Online Chatter for Emerging Cyber Threats'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this