EUREKHA: Enhancing User Representation for Key Hackers Identification in Underground Forums

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Amadou, Abdoul Nasser Hassane, Motii, Anas, Elouardi, Saida, Bergou, EL Houcine
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Amadou, Abdoul Nasser Hassane
Motii, Anas
Elouardi, Saida
Bergou, EL Houcine
author_facet Amadou, Abdoul Nasser Hassane
Motii, Anas
Elouardi, Saida
Bergou, EL Houcine
contents Underground forums serve as hubs for cybercriminal activities, offering a space for anonymity and evasion of conventional online oversight. In these hidden communities, malicious actors collaborate to exchange illicit knowledge, tools, and tactics, driving a range of cyber threats from hacking techniques to the sale of stolen data, malware, and zero-day exploits. Identifying the key instigators (i.e., key hackers), behind these operations is essential but remains a complex challenge. This paper presents a novel method called EUREKHA (Enhancing User Representation for Key Hacker Identification in Underground Forums), designed to identify these key hackers by modeling each user as a textual sequence. This sequence is processed through a large language model (LLM) for domain-specific adaptation, with LLMs acting as feature extractors. These extracted features are then fed into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to model user structural relationships, significantly improving identification accuracy. Furthermore, we employ BERTopic (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Topic Modeling) to extract personalized topics from user-generated content, enabling multiple textual representations per user and optimizing the selection of the most representative sequence. Our study demonstrates that fine-tuned LLMs outperform state-of-the-art methods in identifying key hackers. Additionally, when combined with GNNs, our model achieves significant improvements, resulting in approximately 6% and 10% increases in accuracy and F1-score, respectively, over existing methods. EUREKHA was tested on the Hack-Forums dataset, and we provide open-source access to our code.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_05479
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EUREKHA: Enhancing User Representation for Key Hackers Identification in Underground Forums
Amadou, Abdoul Nasser Hassane
Motii, Anas
Elouardi, Saida
Bergou, EL Houcine
Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
Underground forums serve as hubs for cybercriminal activities, offering a space for anonymity and evasion of conventional online oversight. In these hidden communities, malicious actors collaborate to exchange illicit knowledge, tools, and tactics, driving a range of cyber threats from hacking techniques to the sale of stolen data, malware, and zero-day exploits. Identifying the key instigators (i.e., key hackers), behind these operations is essential but remains a complex challenge. This paper presents a novel method called EUREKHA (Enhancing User Representation for Key Hacker Identification in Underground Forums), designed to identify these key hackers by modeling each user as a textual sequence. This sequence is processed through a large language model (LLM) for domain-specific adaptation, with LLMs acting as feature extractors. These extracted features are then fed into a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to model user structural relationships, significantly improving identification accuracy. Furthermore, we employ BERTopic (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Topic Modeling) to extract personalized topics from user-generated content, enabling multiple textual representations per user and optimizing the selection of the most representative sequence. Our study demonstrates that fine-tuned LLMs outperform state-of-the-art methods in identifying key hackers. Additionally, when combined with GNNs, our model achieves significant improvements, resulting in approximately 6% and 10% increases in accuracy and F1-score, respectively, over existing methods. EUREKHA was tested on the Hack-Forums dataset, and we provide open-source access to our code.
title EUREKHA: Enhancing User Representation for Key Hackers Identification in Underground Forums
topic Cryptography and Security
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05479