How users tweet about a cyber attack: An explorative study using machine learning and social network analysis

Abstract

Cybercrime is a growing threat for firms and customers that emerged with the digitization of business. However, research shows that even though people claim that they are concerned about their privacy online, they do not act correspondingly. This study investigates how prevalent security issues are during a cyber attack among Twitter users. The case under examination is the security breach at the US ticket sales company, Ticketfly, that compromised the information of 26 million users. Tweets related to cybersecurity are detected through the application of automated text classification based on supervised machine learning with support vector machines. Subsequently, the users that wrote security-related tweets are grouped into communities through a social network analysis. The results of this multi-method study show that users concerned about security issues are mostly part of expert communities with already superior knowledge about cybersecurity.