Identifying Key Expert Actors in Cybercrime Forums Based on Their Technical Expertise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of Big Data has made the collection and analysis of cyber threat intelligence challenging due to its volume, leading research to focus on identifying key threat actors; yet these studies have failed to consider the technical expertise of these actors. Expertise, especially towards specific attack patterns, is crucial for cybercrime intelligence, as it focuses on targeting actors with the knowledge and skills to attack enterprises. Using CVEs and CAPEC classifications to build a bimodal network, as well as community detection, k-means and a criminological framework, this study addresses the key hacker identification problem by identifying communities interested in specific attack patterns across cybercrime forums and their related key expert actors. The analyses reveal several key contributions. First, the community structure of the CAPEC-actor bimodal network shows that there exists groups of actors interested in similar attack patterns across cybercrime forums. Second, key actors identified in this study account for about 4% of the study population. Third, about half of the study population are amateurs who show little technical expertise. Finally, key actors highlighted in this study represent a promising scarcity for resources allocation in cyber threat intelligence production. Further research should look into how they develop and use their technical expertise in cybercrime forums.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".