The diffusion of malicious content on Twitter and its impact on security

Abstract

While Twitter remains one of the most popular social media networks within the information security community, threat actors continue to abuse the platform to create, share, and spread malicious contents. In this study, we focus on whether Twitter- and vulnerability-related features can help predict vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited. Using a sample of 6004 tweets, results show that Twitter features (tweets and quote tweets) that combine the benefits of both content creation and sharing can predict active exploitation of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, findings show that certain technical and vulnerability-related features are also capable of predicting active exploitations.