Mohammed Almukaynizi

Soumajyoti Sarkar, Mohammad Almukaynizi, Jana Shakarian et al.

With rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study, we attempt to build a framework that utilizes unconventional signals from the darkweb forums by leveraging the reply network structure of user interactions with the goal of predicting enterprise related external cyber attacks. We use both unsupervised and supervised learning models that address the challenges that come with the lack of enterprise attack metadata for ground truth validation as well as insufficient data for training the models. We validate our models on a binary classification problem that attempts to predict cyber attacks on a daily basis for an organization. Using several controlled studies on features leveraging the network structure, we measure the extent to which the indicators from the darkweb forums can be successfully used to predict attacks. We use information from 53 forums in the darkweb over a span of 17 months for the task. Our framework to predict real world organization cyber attacks of 3 different security events, suggest that focusing on the reply path structure between groups of users based on random walk transitions and community structures has an advantage in terms of better performance solely relying on forum or user posting statistics prior to attacks.

Mohammed Almukaynizi, Vivin Paliath, Malay Shah et al.

With the recent prevalence of darkweb/deepweb (D2web) sites specializing in the trade of exploit kits and malware, malicious actors have easy-access to a wide-range of tools that can empower their offensive capability. In this study, we apply concepts from causal reasoning, itemset mining, and logic programming on historical cryptocurrency-related cyber incidents with intelligence collected from over 400 D2web hacker forums. Our goal was to find indicators of cyber threats targeting cryptocurrency traders and exchange platforms from hacker activity. Our approach found interesting activities that, when observed together in the D2web, subsequent cryptocurrency-related incidents are at least twice as likely to occur than they would if no activity was observed. We also present an algorithmic extension to a previously-introduced algorithm called APT-Extract that allows to model new semantic structures that are specific to our application.

Mohammed Almukaynizi, Ericsson Marin, Eric Nunes et al.

Recent incidents of data breaches call for organizations to proactively identify cyber attacks on their systems. Darkweb/Deepweb (D2web) forums and marketplaces provide environments where hackers anonymously discuss existing vulnerabilities and commercialize malicious software to exploit those vulnerabilities. These platforms offer security practitioners a threat intelligence environment that allows to mine for patterns related to organization-targeted cyber attacks. In this paper, we describe a system (called DARKMENTION) that learns association rules correlating indicators of attacks from D2web to real-world cyber incidents. Using the learned rules, DARKMENTION generates and submits warnings to a Security Operations Center (SOC) prior to attacks. Our goal was to design a system that automatically generates enterprise-targeted warnings that are timely, actionable, accurate, and transparent. We show that DARKMENTION meets our goal. In particular, we show that it outperforms baseline systems that attempt to generate warnings of cyber attacks related to two enterprises with an average increase in F1 score of about 45% and 57%. Additionally, DARKMENTION was deployed as part of a larger system that is built under a contract with the IARPA Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment (CAUSE) program. It is actively producing warnings that precede attacks by an average of 3 days.