Proactive identification of exploits in the wild through vulnerability mentions online

The number of software vulnerabilities discovered and publicly disclosed is increasing every year; however, only a small fraction of them is exploited in real-world attacks. With limitations on time and skilled resources, organizations often look at ways to identify threatened vulnerabilities for patch prioritization. In this paper, we present an exploit prediction model that predicts whether a vulnerability will be exploited. Our proposed model leverages data from a variety of online data sources (white-hat community, vulnerability researchers community, and darkweb/deepweb sites) with vulnerability mentions. Compared to the standard scoring system (CVSS base score), our model outperforms the baseline models with an F1 measure of 0.40 on the minority class (266% improvement over CVSS base score) and also achieves high True Positive Rate at low False Positive Rate (90%, 13%, respectively). The results demonstrate that the model is highly effective as an early predictor of exploits that could appear in the wild. We also present a qualitative and quantitative study regarding the increase in the likelihood of exploitation incurred when a vulnerability is mentioned in each of the data sources we examine.