DISCOVER: Mining Online Chatter for Emerging Cyber Threats.

Widespread adoption of networking technologies has brought about tremendous economic and social growth, but also exposed individuals and organization to new threats from malicious cyber actors. Recent attacks by WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware crypto-worms, infected hundreds of thousands of computer systems world wide, compromising data and critical infrastructure. In order to limit their impact, it is, therefore, critical to detect---and even predict---cyber attacks before they spread. Here, we introduce DISCOVER, an early cyber threat warning system, that mines online chatter from cyber actors on social media, security blogs, and darkweb forums, to identify words that signal potential cyber attacks. We evaluate DISCOVER and find that it can identify terms related to emerging cyber threats with precision above $80%$. DISCOVER also generates a time line of related online discussions on different Web sources that can be useful for analyzing emerging cyber threats.