Detecting Denial-of-Service Attacks from Social Media Text: Applying NLP to Computer Security

Nathanael Chambers, Ben Fry, James McMasters


Abstract
This paper describes a novel application of NLP models to detect denial of service attacks using only social media as evidence. Individual networks are often slow in reporting attacks, so a detection system from public data could better assist a response to a broad attack across multiple services. We explore NLP methods to use social media as an indirect measure of network service status. We describe two learning frameworks for this task: a feed-forward neural network and a partially labeled LDA model. Both models outperform previous work by significant margins (20% F1 score). We further show that the topic-based model enables the first fine-grained analysis of how the public reacts to ongoing network attacks, discovering multiple “stages” of observation. This is the first model that both detects network attacks (with best performance) and provides an analysis of when and how the public interprets service outages. We describe the models, present experiments on the largest twitter DDoS corpus to date, and conclude with an analysis of public reactions based on the learned model’s output.
Anthology ID:
N18-1147
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1626–1635
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1147
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1147
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nathanael Chambers, Ben Fry, and James McMasters. 2018. Detecting Denial-of-Service Attacks from Social Media Text: Applying NLP to Computer Security. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 1626–1635, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Denial-of-Service Attacks from Social Media Text: Applying NLP to Computer Security (Chambers et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1147.pdf