Predicting Cyber Events by Leveraging Hacker Sentiment

Recent high-profile cyber attacks exemplify why organizations need better cyber defenses. Cyber threats are hard to accurately predict because attackers usually try to mask their traces. However, they often discuss exploits and techniques on hacking forums. The community behavior of the hackers may provide insights into groups' collective malicious activity. We propose a novel approach to predict cyber events using sentiment analysis. We test our approach using cyber attack data from 2 major business organizations. We consider 3 types of events: malicious software installation, malicious destination visits, and malicious emails that surpassed the target organizations' defenses. We construct predictive signals by applying sentiment analysis on hacker forum posts to better understand hacker behavior. We analyze over 400K posts generated between January 2016 and January 2018 on over 100 hacking forums both on surface and Dark Web. We find that some forums have significantly more predictive power than others. Sentiment-based models that leverage specific forums can outperform state-of-the-art deep learning and time-series models on forecasting cyber attacks weeks ahead of the events

Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

Cyber Situational Awareness in Critical Infrastructure Protection

The European Union promotes collaboration between authorities and the private sector, and the providers of the most critical services to society face security related obligations. In this paper, critical infrastructure is seen as a system of systems that can be subject to cyber-attacks and&nbsp; other disturbances. Situational awareness (SA) enhances preparations for and decision-making during assessed and unforeseen disruptive incidents, and promoting Cyber effective situational&nbsp; awareness (CSA) requires information sharing between the different interest groups. This research is constructive in nature, where innovative constructions developed as solutions&nbsp; for domain-specific real world problems, while the research question is: “How can cyber&nbsp; situational awareness protect critical infrastructures?” The Observe – Orient – Decide – Act (OODA) loop is examined as a way to promote&nbsp; collaboration towards a shared situational picture, awareness and understanding to meet challenges of forming CSA in relation to risk assessment (RA) and improving resilience. Three levels of organizational decision-making are examined in relation a five-layer cyber structure of an organization to provide a more comprehensive systems view of organizational cyber security. Successful, crisis-management efforts enable organizations to sustain and resume operations, minimize losses, and adapt to manage future incidents, as many critical&nbsp;infrastructures typically lack resilience and may easily lose essential functionality when hit by&nbsp;an adverse event. Situation awareness is the main prerequisite towards cyber security. Without situation awareness, it is impossible to systematically prevent, identify, and protect the system from cyber incidents.</p