Detecting Cyber Threat Event from Twitter Using IDCNN and BiLSTM

• Main Authors: Yong Fang, Jian Gao, Zhonglin Liu, Cheng Huang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-08-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: event detection; cyber threat; Twitter data; machine learning
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/17/5922

In the context of increasing cyber threats and attacks, monitoring and analyzing network security incidents in a timely and effective way is the key to ensuring network infrastructure security. As one of the world’s most popular social media sites, users post all kinds of messages on Twitter, from daily life to global news and political strategy. It can aggregate a large number of network security-related events promptly and provide a source of information flow about cyber threats. In this paper, for detecting cyber threat events on Twitter, we present a multi-task learning approach based on the natural language processing technology and machine learning algorithm of the Iterated Dilated Convolutional Neural Network (IDCNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) to establish a highly accurate network model. Furthermore, we collect a network threat-related Twitter database from the public datasets to verify our model’s performance. The results show that the proposed model works well to detect cyber threat events from tweets and significantly outperform several baselines.