Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of Social Media: Exploiting Twitter for Predicting Real-World Exploits

In recent years, the number of software vulnerabilities discovered has grown significantly. This creates a need for prioritizing the response to new disclosures by assess-ing which vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited and by quickly ruling out the vulnerabilities that are not actually exploited in the real world. We conduct a quantitative and qualitative exploration of the vulnerability-related information disseminated on Twitter. We then describe the design of a Twitter-based exploit detector, and we in-troduce a threat model specific to our problem. In addi-tion to response prioritization, our detection techniques have applications in risk modeling for cyber-insurance and they highlight the value of information provided by the victims of attacks.