Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
3-2019
Abstract
Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion decreases DDOS attacks by 0.032% to 0.122%. This means that two DDOS-attack posts per day could reduce the number of victims by 700 to 2,600 per day. We find that discussion topics with similar keywords can variously increase or decrease DDOS attacks, meaning we cannot ascertain the impact of the discussion just by the post nature. Mentioning botnets, especially new botnets, increases the attacks, but the follow-up discussion decreases the attacks. Our results suggest that online-hacker-forum discussion may exhibit the dual-use characteristic. That is, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. We draw related managerial implications.
Keywords
Hacker forum, distributed denial of service attack, backscatter data, dual use, panel regression, content analysis
Discipline
Information Security
Research Areas
Cybersecurity
Publication
MIS Quarterly
Volume
43
Issue
1
First Page
73
Last Page
95
ISSN
0276-7783
Identifier
10.25300/MISQ/2019/13042
Publisher
University of Minnesota, Management Information Systems Research Center
Citation
YUE, Wei T.; WANG, Qiu-Hong; and HUI, Kai‐Lung.
See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums. (2019). MIS Quarterly. 43, (1), 73-95.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4377
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2019/13042