HackerScope: the dynamics of a massive hacker online ecosystem

Abstract

One would have thought that hackers would be striving to hide from public view, but we find that this is not the case: they have a public online footprint. Apart from online security forums, this footprint appears also in software development platforms, where authors create publicly accessible malware repositories to share and collaborate. With the exception of a few recent efforts, the existence and the dynamics of this community has received surprisingly limited attention. The goal of our work is to analyze this ecosystem of hackers in order to: (a) understand their collaborative patterns and (b) identify and profile its most influential authors. We develop HackerScope, a systematic approach for analyzing the dynamics of this hacker ecosystem. Leveraging our targeted data collection, we conduct an extensive study of 7389 authors of malware repositories on GitHub, which we combine with their activity on four security forums. From a modelling point of view, we study the ecosystem using three network representations: (a) the author-author network, (b) the author-repository network and (c) cross-platform egonets. Our analysis leads to the following key observations: (a) the ecosystem is growing at an accelerating rate as the number of new malware authors per year triples every 2 years, (b) it is highly collaborative, more so than the rest of GitHub authors, and (c) it includes influential and professional hackers. We find 101 authors maintain an online “brand” across GitHub and our online forums. Our study is a significant step towards using public online information for understanding the malicious hacker community.