Analysis of Security Messages Posted on Twitter

The fast spread of computer security alerts, like vulnerabilities notifications, applications updates and threats of attacks, is essential to efficient reactive measures against security incidents. This paper presents an empirical study that evaluates the efficiency of using twitter posts, related to computer security, as notifications of security alerts. The justification to this study is the fact that posts from microblogs have a very fast spread over the Internet. By using similarity analysis and clustering between twitter posts and alerts from specialized sites, it was verified that microblogs spread computer security alerts in a reliable way, reach a high level of dissemination and inform about security threats before some specialized sites.