Analysis of Trending Topics and Text-based Channels of Information Delivery in Cybersecurity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes cybersecurity texts from various sources to identify trending topics and security issues, proposing a semi-automated classification method that reveals insights into the impact and dissemination of security information.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-automated classification approach for cybersecurity texts and compares security categories across sources, revealing correlations and dissemination patterns.

Findings

Cybersecurity impact correlates with monetary losses.

Security blogs have the highest popularity and impact.

Websites often lack timeliness in delivering security information.

Abstract

Computer users are generally faced with difficulties in making correct security decisions. While an increasingly fewer number of people are trying or willing to take formal security training, online sources including news, security blogs, and websites are continuously making security knowledge more accessible. Analysis of cybersecurity texts can provide insights into the trending topics and identify current security issues as well as how cyber attacks evolve over time. These in turn can support researchers and practitioners in predicting and preparing for these attacks. Comparing different sources may facilitate the learning process for normal users by persisting the security knowledge gained from different cybersecurity context. Prior studies neither systematically analysed the wide-range of digital sources nor provided any standardisation in analysing the trending topics from recent security texts. Although LDA has been widely adopted in topic generation, its generated topics cannot cover the cybersecurity concepts completely and considerably overlap. To address this issue, we propose a semi-automated classification method to generate comprehensive security categories instead of LDA-generated topics. We further compare the identified 16 security categories across different sources based on their popularity and impact. We have revealed several surprising findings. (1) The impact reflected from cyber-security texts strongly correlates with the monetary loss caused by cybercrimes. (2) For most categories, security blogs share the largest popularity and largest absolute/relative impact over time. (3) Websites deliver security information without caring about timeliness much, where one third of the articles do not specify the date and the rest have a time lag in posting emerging security issues.