Darkweb Cyber Threat Intelligence Mining

Dear Colleagues,

Malicious hacker communities leverage the deepweb and darkweb to buy, sell, and trade malware, exploits, and stolen data. Because of this, many security researchers have leveraged this data to understand the activities of such groups with respect to ongoing cyber attacks—with the goal to identify emerging threats, support forensic investigations, and even predict cyber-attacks. However, the many challenges in obtaining, analysing, and updating such data in an automated and stealthy fashion—and do so at scale. This special issue focuses on new techniques for how darkweb/deepweb hacker data can be automatically obtained and transformed into actionable cyber threat intelligence—thereby aiding network defenders in avoiding cyber attacks, finding breached information, and, generally, understanding hacker communities. Topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Mining the deepweb and darkweb
2. Big data technologies for managing deepweb/darkweb data
3. Cleaning deepweb/darkweb data
4. Extracting information from deepweb/darkweb data
5. Social network analysis on deepweb/darkweb hacker communities
6. Alignment of deepweb/darkweb data with other data sources
7. Prediction of cyber attacks using deepweb/darkweb data
8. Social science studies of malicious hacker communities on the deepweb/darkweb
9. Predicting software exploitability using deepweb/darkweb
10. Game theoretic methods to model attacker behaviour using darkweb/deepweb data

Prof. Paulo Shakarian
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.