Crowdsourcing cybersecurity: Cyber attack detection using social media

Rupinder Paul Khandpur, Taoran Ji, Steve Jan, Gang Wang, Chang Tien Lu, Naren Ramakrishnan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach detects a broad range of cyber-attacks (e.g., distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, data breaches, and account hijacking) in a weakly supervised manner using just a small set of seed event triggers and requires no training or labeled samples. A new query expansion strategy based on convolution kernels and dependency parses helps model semantic structure and aids in identifying key event characteristics. Through a large-scale analysis over Twitter, we demonstrate that our approach consistently identifies and encodes events, outperforming existing methods.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCIKM 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery,
Pages1049-1057
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349185
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 6 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2017 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: Nov 6 2017Nov 10 2017

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings
VolumePart F131841

Other

Other26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2017
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period11/6/1711/10/17

Keywords

  • Cyber attacks
  • Cyber security
  • Dynamic query expansion
  • Event detection
  • Social media
  • Twitter

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business, Management and Accounting(all)
  • Decision Sciences(all)

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Crowdsourcing cybersecurity: Cyber attack detection using social media'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this