On the relevance of social media platforms in predicting the volume and patterns of web defacement attacks

Abstract

Social media platforms are commonly employed for collecting Open Source Intelligence (OSNIT) on criminals, and assessing the risk they pose to the environment they live in. However, since no prior research has investigated the relationships between hackers' use of social media platforms and their likelihood to generate cyber-attacks, this practice is less common among Information Technology Teams. Addressing this empirical gap, we draw on the social learning theory to estimate the relationships between hackers' use of social media platforms and web defacement attacks. We use publicly available hackers' reports of successful web defacement attacks and complemented with an independent data collection we launched to identify these hackers' use of different social media platforms. Our analysis and results reveal a significant link between hackers' use of social media platforms, specifically Twitter and Facebook, and the volume of web defacement attacks. While using these social media platforms is related to an increase in the volume of attacks generated during weekdays, it has no association with the volume of attacks they launch over weekends. Finally, although hackers' use of both Facebook and Twitter accounts is associated with an increase in the frequency of attacks generated against non-USA websites, the use of only Twitter is linked to a significant increase in the volume of web defacement attacks against USA websites.