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 …

Date

April 23, 2018

Authors

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

Book

Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018

Pages

983-990