An Unsupervised Learning Approach For A Reliable Profiling Of Cyber Threat Actors Reported Globally Based On Complete Contextual Information Of Cyber Attacks

Abstract: Cyber attacks are rapidly increasing with the advancement of technology and there is no protection for our information. To prevent future cyberattacks it is critical to promptly recognize cyberattacks and establish strong defense mechanisms against them. To respond to cybersecurity threats immediately, it is essential to examine the attackers skills, knowledge, and behaviors with the goal of evaluating their impact on the system and comprehending the traits associated with these attacks. Creating a profile of cyber threat actors based on their traits or patterns of behavior can help to create effective defenses against cyberattacks in advance. In the current literature, multiple supervised machine learning based approaches considered a smaller number of features for attacker profiling that are reported in textual cyber threat incident documents although these profiles have been developed based on the security experts own perception, we cannot rely on them. Supervised machine learning approaches strictly depend upon the structure data set. This usually leads to a two step process where we first have to establish a structured data set before we can analyze it and then employ it to construct defense mechanisms, which takes time. In this paper, an unsupervised efficient agglomerative hierarchal clustering technique is proposed for profiling cybercriminal groups based on their comprehensive contextual threat information in order to address the aforementioned issues. The main objective of this report is to identify the relationship between cyber threat actors based on their common features, aggregate them, and also profile cyber criminal groups.