See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums

Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion d...

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Main Authors: YUE, Wei T., WANG, Qiu-Hong, HUI, Kai‐Lung
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Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4377
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/viewcontent/hacker_forum_sv.pdf
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/04_13042_RA_YueWangHuiAppendices.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-53802020-04-07T09:23:10Z See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums YUE, Wei T. WANG, Qiu-Hong HUI, Kai‐Lung Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion decreases DDOS attacks by 0.032% to 0.122%. This means that two DDOS-attack posts per day could reduce the number of victims by 700 to 2,600 per day. We find that discussion topics with similar keywords can variously increase or decrease DDOS attacks, meaning we cannot ascertain the impact of the discussion just by the post nature. Mentioning botnets, especially new botnets, increases the attacks, but the follow-up discussion decreases the attacks. Our results suggest that online-hacker-forum discussion may exhibit the dual-use characteristic. That is, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. We draw related managerial implications. 2019-03-01T08:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4377 info:doi/10.25300/MISQ/2019/13042 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/viewcontent/hacker_forum_sv.pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/04_13042_RA_YueWangHuiAppendices.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Hacker forum distributed denial of service attack backscatter data dual use panel regression content analysis Information Security
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Hacker forum
distributed denial of service attack
backscatter data
dual use
panel regression
content analysis
Information Security
spellingShingle Hacker forum
distributed denial of service attack
backscatter data
dual use
panel regression
content analysis
Information Security
YUE, Wei T.
WANG, Qiu-Hong
HUI, Kai‐Lung
See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
description Online hacker forums offer a prominent avenue for sharing hacking knowledge. Using a field dataset culled from multiple sources, we find that online discussion of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in hackforums.net decreases the number of DDOS-attack victims. A 1% increase in discussion decreases DDOS attacks by 0.032% to 0.122%. This means that two DDOS-attack posts per day could reduce the number of victims by 700 to 2,600 per day. We find that discussion topics with similar keywords can variously increase or decrease DDOS attacks, meaning we cannot ascertain the impact of the discussion just by the post nature. Mentioning botnets, especially new botnets, increases the attacks, but the follow-up discussion decreases the attacks. Our results suggest that online-hacker-forum discussion may exhibit the dual-use characteristic. That is, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. We draw related managerial implications.
format text
author YUE, Wei T.
WANG, Qiu-Hong
HUI, Kai‐Lung
author_facet YUE, Wei T.
WANG, Qiu-Hong
HUI, Kai‐Lung
author_sort YUE, Wei T.
title See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
title_short See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
title_full See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
title_fullStr See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
title_full_unstemmed See no evil, hear no evil? Dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
title_sort see no evil, hear no evil? dissecting the impact of online hacker forums
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2019
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4377
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/viewcontent/hacker_forum_sv.pdf
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5380/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/04_13042_RA_YueWangHuiAppendices.pdf
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