Analyzing the Perceived Severity of Cybersecurity Threats Reported on Social Media

Shi Zong, Alan Ritter, Graham Mueller, Evan Wright

Abstract
Breaking cybersecurity events are shared across a range of websites, including security blogs (FireEye, Kaspersky, etc.), in addition to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In this paper, we investigate methods to analyze the severity of cybersecurity threats based on the language that is used to describe them online. A corpus of 6,000 tweets describing software vulnerabilities is annotated with authors’ opinions toward their severity. We show that our corpus supports the development of automatic classifiers with high precision for this task. Furthermore, we demonstrate the value of analyzing users’ opinions about the severity of threats reported online as an early indicator of important software vulnerabilities. We present a simple, yet effective method for linking software vulnerabilities reported in tweets to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Using our predicted severity scores, we show that it is possible to achieve a Precision@50 of 0.86 when forecasting high severity vulnerabilities, significantly outperforming a baseline that is based on tweet volume. Finally we show how reports of severe vulnerabilities online are predictive of real-world exploits.
Anthology ID:
N19-1140
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1380–1390
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1140
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1140
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shi Zong, Alan Ritter, Graham Mueller, and Evan Wright. 2019. Analyzing the Perceived Severity of Cybersecurity Threats Reported on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1380–1390, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Analyzing the Perceived Severity of Cybersecurity Threats Reported on Social Media (Zong et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/N19-1140.pdf
Code
 viczong/cybersecurity_threat_severity_analysis
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