Extracting Information about Security Vulnerabilities from Web Text

The Web is an important source of information about computer security threats, vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks. We present initial work on developing a framework to detect and extract information about vulnerabilities and attacks from Web text. Our prototype system uses Wikitology, a general purpose knowledge base derived from Wikipedia, to extract concepts that describe specific vulnerabilities and attacks, map them to related concepts from DBpedia and generate machine understandable assertions. Such a framework will be useful in adding structure to already existing vulnerability descriptions as well as detecting new ones. We evaluate our approach against vulnerability descriptions from the National Vulnerability Database. Our results suggest that it can be useful in monitoring streams of text from social media or chat rooms to identify potential new attacks and vulnerabilities or to collect data on the spread and volume of existing ones.