"Using Chatter on the Grapevine to Ace Cybersecurity Report Card"
Attackers continue to change their techniques to evade security solutions implemented by targeted organizations, making it increasingly difficult to defend against cyberattacks. Therefore, cybersecurity experts at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed a new model to help organizations bolster their cyber threat intelligence. The model is used to help funding partner Avertro strengthen its Cyber Management Decision System platform called CyberHQ. In helping companies with their cybersecurity capabilities, the platform can also identify, track, and manage cyber threats for executives at the business level and cybersecurity teams at the technical level. Many company cybersecurity programs on the market typically gather data from internal or external sources. However, this has two significant drawbacks. First, most of them produce ratings and metrics primarily stemming from a single type of source, whether internal or external. Second, they cannot learn the dynamic evolutionary patterns of cyber threats. In order to address these limitations, Avertro CyberHQ's modeling input includes both internal and external data sources, such as system logs, network equipment, boundary security devices, and antivirus systems, as well as the social media platform Twitter. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn cyber threat trends and scores the company based on the predicted level of risk it poses. According to Dr. Jiaojiao Jiang, one of UNSW's cybersecurity experts, it is common for cybersecurity professionals and even hackers to exchange critical technical knowledge regarding trending attacks and emerging cyber threats on social media, blogs, and forums. This article continues to discuss the UNSW experts' use of social media data to develop modeling aimed at strengthening cyber threat intelligence.