Exploring key hackers and cybersecurity threats in Chinese hacker communities

Chinese hacker communities are of interest to cybersecurity researchers and investigators. When examining Chinese hacker communities, researchers and investigators face many challenges, including understanding the Chinese language, detecting variations in topic evolution, and identifying key hackers with their specialty areas. Therefore, we are motivated to develop a framework for analyzing key hackers and emerging threats in Chinese hacker communities. Specifically, we develop a set of topic models for extracting popular topics, tracking topic evolution, and identifying key hackers with their specialty topics. We applied our framework to 19 major Chinese hacker communities. As a result, we identified five major popular topics, including trading, fraud prevention & identification, calling for cooperation, casual chat, and monetizing. Moreover, we found several trends related to new communication channels, new stolen cards of interest, and new operating mechanism. Further, we also found the key hackers in each extracted area. Our work contributes to the cybersecurity literature by providing an advanced and scalable framework for analyzing Chinese hacker communities.