An empirical study of malicious threads in security forums

Abstract

How useful is the information that a security analyst can extract from a security forum? We focus on threads of interest, which we define as: (i) alerts of worrisome events, such as attacks, (ii) offering of malicious services and products, (iii) hacking information to perform malicious acts, and (iv) useful security-related experiences. The analysis of security forums is in its infancy despite several promising recent works. Here, we leverage our earlier work in thread analysis, and ask the question: what kind of information do these malicious threads provide. Specifically, we analyze threads in three dimensions: (a) temporal characteristics, (b) user-centric characteristics (c) content-centric properties. We study threads pulled from three security forums spanning the period 2012-2016. First, we show that 53% of the users asking/selling malicious Services on average has 3 posts and initiate 1 thread and 1 day lifetime. Second, we argue that careful analysis can help to identify emerging threats reported in security forums through Services and Alerts threads and potentially help security analysts prevent attacks. We see this study as a first attempt to argue for the wealth and type of information that can be extracted from security forums.