Do Hacker Forums Contribute to Security Attacks?

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

1-2012

Abstract

There has been an increased amount of discussion about firms needing to account for the hacker's perspective in protecting their information assets. However, we still have very little idea about how attack information is disseminated within the hacker community. In this paper, we study the role of hacker forums in disseminating vulnerability information that leads to attacks. We found that the discussions in online hacker forums correlate significantly with the number of cyber-attacks observed in the real world. Furthermore, hacker forums also play a moderating role in disseminating vulnerability and threat information. As cyber security becomes an increasingly prominent issue for firms, our study indicates that there is a need to study the behaviors of the participants in the hacker forum further in order to better understand the risks that they pose.

Keywords

Electronic commerce, Industry, Personal computing, Security of data, Cyber security, Cyber-attacks, Hacker communities, Information assets, Security attacks

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life: 10th Workshop on E-Business, WEB 2011, Shanghai, China, December 4, 2011

Volume

108

First Page

143

Last Page

152

ISBN

9783642298721

Identifier

10.1007/978-3-642-29873-8_14

Publisher

Springer

City or Country

Berlin

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29873-8_14

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