In order to secure vital personal and organizational system we require timely intelligence on cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. Intelligence about these threats is generally available in both overt and covert sources like the National Vulnerability Database, CERT alerts, blog posts, social media, and dark web resources. Intelligence updates about cybersecurity can be viewed as temporal events that a security analyst must keep up with so as to secure a computer system. We describe CyberTwitter, a system to discover and analyze cybersecurity intelligence on Twitter and serve as a OSINT (Open-source intelligence) source. We analyze real time information updates, in form of tweets, to extract intelligence about various possible threats. We use the Semantic Web RDF to represent the intelligence gathered and SWRL rules to reason over extracted intelligence to issue alerts for security analysts.
We describe work on automatically inferring the intended meaning of tables and representing it as RDF linked data, making it available for improving search, interoperability and integration. We present implementation details of a joint inference module that uses knowledge from the linked open data (LOD) cloud to jointly infer the semantics of column headers, table cell values (e.g., strings and numbers) and relations between columns. We also implement a novel Semantic Message Passing algorithm which uses LOD knowledge to improve existing message passing schemes. We evaluate our implemented techniques on tables from the Web and Wikipedia.
The Web is an important source of information about computer security threats, vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. We present initial work on developing a framework to detect and extract information about vulnerabilities and attacks from Web text. Our prototype system uses Wikitology, a general purpose knowledge base derived from Wikipedia, to extract concepts that describe specific vulnerabilities and attacks, map them to related concepts from DBpedia and generate machine understandable assertions. Such a framework will be useful in adding structure to already existing vulnerability descriptions as well as detecting new ones. We evaluate our approach against vulnerability descriptions from the National Vulnerability Database. Our results suggest that it can be useful in monitoring streams of text from social media or chat rooms to identify potential new attacks and vulnerabilities or to collect data on the spread and volume of existing ones.
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