Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is an important asset for organisations to facilitate the safeguarding of their systems against new and emerging cyber threats. CTI continuously provides up-to-date information which enables the design and implementation of better security measures and mitigation strategies. Organisations gather data from different sources either internal or external to the organisation, which are analysed, resulting in CTI. Nevertheless, the gathered data usually contain a large amount of content that is irrelevant to CTI or even to cybersecurity. Furthermore, most approaches concerning CTI management (e.g., gathering, analysis) involve simply gathering and storing the information without any enrichment such as classification or correlation. However, in order to obtain the optimal results, organisations should be able to utilise all capabilities of CTI. Therefore, in this work, we propose ThreatWise AI, a novel framework which enables the gathering, analysis, enrichment, storing and sharing of CTI in an efficient and secure manner. In particular, we have developed a novel pipeline in ThreatWise AI which incorporates different advanced tools, with distinct capabilities that interact with each other to provide a complete set of functionalities for the administration of the overall CTI lifecycle. The developed tools integrate various Python scripts and provide gathering and analysis functionalities of CTI. Furthermore, the proposed framework leverages the MISP platform for storing, enriching and sharing while it also integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for advanced data enrichment.
Given the increasing occurrence of deviant activities in online platforms, it is of paramount importance to develop methods and tools that allow in-depth analysis and understanding to then develop effective countermeasures. This work proposes a framework towards detecting statistically significant change points in terrorism-related time series, which may indicate the occurrence of events to be paid attention to. These change points may reflect changes in the attitude towards and/or engagement with terrorism-related activities and events, possibly signifying, for instance, an escalation in the radicalization process. In particular, the proposed framework involves: (i) classification of online textual data as terrorism- and hate speech-related, which can be considered as indicators of a potential criminal or terrorist activity; and (ii) change point analysis in the time series generated by these data. The use of change point detection (CPD) algorithms in the produced time series of the aforementioned indicators—either in a univariate or two-dimensional case—can lead to the estimation of statistically significant changes in their structural behavior at certain time locations. To evaluate the proposed framework, we apply it on a publicly available dataset related to jihadist forums. Finally, topic detection on the estimated change points is implemented to further assess its effectiveness.