CybAttT: A Dataset of Cyberattack News Tweets for Enhanced Threat Intelligence

Abstract

The continuous developments in information technologies have resulted in a significant rise in security concerns, including cybercrimes, unauthorized access, and cyberattacks. Recently, researchers have increasingly turned to social media platforms like X to investigate cyberattacks. Analyzing and collecting news about cyberattacks from tweets can efficiently provide crucial insights into the attacks themselves, including their impacts, occurrence regions, and potential mitigation strategies. However, there is a shortage of labeled datasets related to cyberattacks. This paper describes CybAttT, a dataset of 36,071 English cyberattack-related tweets. These tweets are manually labeled into three classes: high-risk news, normal news, and not news. Our final overall Inner Annotation agreement was 0.99 (Fleiss kappa), which represents high agreement. To ensure dataset reliability and accuracy, we conducted rigorous experiments using different supervised machine learning algorithms and various fine-tuned language models to assess its quality and suitability for its intended purpose. A high F1-score of 87.6% achieved using the CybAttT dataset not only demonstrates the potential of our approach but also validates the high quality and thoroughness of its annotations. We have made our CybAttT dataset accessible to the public for research purposes.

Keywords

• cyberattacks
• dataset
• labeling
• tweets
• classification
• machine learning