This document discusses using the open-source statistical software R to analyze security-related information from Twitter. It provides instructions on installing relevant R packages for accessing the Twitter API and searching for tweets containing specific keywords or hashtags. As an example, it searches for tweets with the hashtag "#exploit" and visualizes the results in a heatmap to show when during the day the tweets were posted.

1. Mining Tweets for
Security Information
with “R”
Jeff Stanton, School of Information Studies
Syracuse University

2. @highfours: I just
watched a plane
crash into the
hudson rive in
manhattan
@ReallyVirtual:
Helicopter
hovering above
Abbotabad at 1AM
(is a rare event).
Twitter: Early Warning System?

3. 2:26 pm 2:44 PM 3:15 PM
UCLA TMZ.com Twitter
Twitter Facts

4.  140 characters max
 @petridishes – Screen Name
 #blackberry – User-created hashtag
 @crozzledhearts – “Retweeter” who sent this
tweet after receiving it from @petridishes
 30 minutes ago via web – Each tweet
encoded with UTC timecode
 No URLs here, but they are auto-shortened
Anatomy of a Tweet

5. “R” – Open Source Analytics

6.  A GNU open source project
 An implementation of the “S” statistical
language developed at Bell labs
 Largely an interpreted, command-line
interface with some GUI add-ons
 More than 4300 add-on packages developed
by the user community
 Full-featured data management and matrix
manipulation with performance comparable
to Octave and MATLAB
 Extensive graphics for visualization
 Starting in 2010, used by more data miners
(43%) than any other single tool
“R” Facts

7.  Developed by Jeff
Gentry (Fidelity)
 Five classes and 11
functions to:
◦ Authenticate to Twitter
with Oauth and check
current rate limit
◦ Manipulate, send, and
receive direct messages
◦ Update user status
◦ Search for tweets
containing particular
keywords or hashtags
◦ Examine topic trends
◦ Examine timelines
The “twitteR” package

8.  Use the R “Packages” menu to install the
necessary packages:
bitops, RJSONIO, RCurl, and twitteR
 Depending upon Mac/Win/Linux, you may need
to retrieve a zipped file of RCurl from:
◦ http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contri
b/2.14/
 Then ready the packages for use in R with the
library() command:
> library(bitops)
> library(RCurl)
> library(RJSONIO)
> library(twitteR)
Getting Ready – Load Packages

9. > expTweets <- searchTwitter('#exploit', n=500)
> expDF <-
do.call("rbind", lapply(expTweets, as.data.fr
ame))
 The second command above takes the raw tweet data in
expTweets – which starts as a list/collection of separate
data objects (frames) – and binds it into a single data
frame for ease of analysis
 lapply() applies a command to each element of a list
 as.data.frame is a type coercion
 rbind is the function that joins separate objects to become
rows in a dataframe
 do.call() repeats the rbind over all elements of the list
Search Twitter for “#exploit”

10. > head(expDF,1)
text: RT @hacktalkblog: New Exploit [webapps] - Wordpress Age
Verification Plugin http://t.co/O8wVjKca #Exploit
favorited: FALSE
replyToSN: NA
created: 2012-01-10 18:19:11
truncated: FALSE
replyToSID: <NA>
id: 156802281747124224
replyToUID: NA
statusSource: &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitterfeed.com&quot;
rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;twitterfeed&lt;/a&gt;
screenName: NotaThreat2u
A Preview of the Data

11. > head(expDF$created,1)
Histogram of expDF$created
[1] "2012-01-10 18:19:11
UTC“
20
 The created variable is
conveniently coded as a
15
POSIX time variable
Frequency
calibrated to UTC
10
>
hist(expDF$created, breaks=15,
5
freq=TRUE)
0
 Shows a frequency
histogram (with about 15 13:50 18:00 22:10 02:20 06:30 10:40
break points) expDF$created
 Nice spike at 18:00 UTC
(about 1pm EST)
Visualizing the Data: When Tweeted?
11

12. # Total time between 1st and last tweet
elapsedTime = max(expDF$created) - min(expDF$created)
timeBin = floor(elapsedTime/11) # Make 11 bins
# Add a new variable with the bin designators
expDF$slice = floor((expDF$created -
min(expDF$created))/(as.integer(timeBin)*3600))
expSlices<-expDF[,c("screenName","slice")] # subset the data
expTable<-table(expSlices) # Count tweets in each slice
# Convert table data to matrix that heatmap() expects
expMatrix<-matrix(expTable,ncol=length(colnames(expTable)))
rownames(expMatrix)<-rownames(expTable)
colnames(expMatrix)<-paste('Slice',1:12)
heatmap(expMatrix,Rowv=NA,Colv=NA,
col=rainbow(max(expMatrix)+1,start=0.5,end=.7))
Prepare a Heatmap

13. xoMC_DDL
TheRomamane
TheKingNappy
lauura_5
Sara_Katelyn
kapitanluffy
Zf1r3
CyberCrimeNEWS
CcureIT
Brain_0verride
drb0n3z
sapo2025
packet_storm
cybfor
csec
Federico_II
cloeliae
manero94
Hamoud_Oz
belmontemartin
pretorienx
secwatched
cedricpernet
g4l4drim
unixfreaxjp
theBestRhiannon
bortzmeyer
macmark_de
CyberDomain
cinnamon_carter
binushacker
escan_sachin
shadowy47
iWorlds_it
hacktalkblog
NotaThreat2u
Slice10
Slice11
Slice12
Slice1
Slice2
Slice3
Slice4
Slice5
Slice6
Slice7
Slice8
Slice9

14. library(stringr) # Provides easy string
functions
str_match(expDF$text, "^RT @") # Find RT @ at
beginning of each line
 Regular expression matching any number of
alphanumeric characters or underscore:
[[:alnum:]_]*
str_match(expDF$text, "^RT @[[:alnum:]_]*") #
Matches the whole retweet screen name
expDF$rtSN = str_match(expDF$text, "^RT
@[[:alnum:]_]*") # Adds a new variable
Do Some Parsing with Regex

15. 0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
RT @_joviann_
RT @cedricpernet
RT @CyberCrimeNEWS
RT @hacktalkblog
RT @packet_storm
RT @unixfreaxjp
plot(as.factor(expDF$rtSN),las=2)
15

16. exploitWords = strsplit(levels(expDF$text)," ")
exploitWords = unlist(exploitWords)
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "^RT @[[:alnum:]_]*","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "@[[:alnum:]_]*","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "#Exploit","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "#exploit","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "^http.*","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, ":","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "_","")
exploitWords = str_replace_all(exploitWords, "-","")
exploitWords = tolower(exploitWords)
exploitWords = sort(exploitWords)
wordCount = summary(as.factor(exploitWords))
wordCount = wordCount[wordCount<(max(wordCount)-1)]
wordCount = wordCount[wordCount>4]
barplot(wordCount,las=2)
Make a Keyword List

17. 0
5
10
15
20
25
30
#security
rt
alert
exploit
injection
sql
cross
scripting
site
#ccureit
new
remote
vulnerability
#cyber
#cyberwar
#hacker
buffer
cms
file
and
disclosure
of
1.4
execution
vulnerabilities
wordpress
/
[webapps]
analysis
multiple
overflow
1.3.3
Most common keywords
advanced
code
command
en
for
information
phpmydirectory
with
17

18.  #security – Another good hashtag to search on
 (SQL) Injection – Apparently one of the most common
attacks
 cross (site) scripting – Another popular attack
 #cyber #cyberwar #ccureit #hacker – More
hashtags?
 remote vulnerability, buffer (overflow), cms,
wordpress, phpmydirectory
 Each/any of these keywords could provide a basis for a
new tweet search term, or for keyword detection within a
set of tweets obtained from another search, or for an alert
dashboard with periodic updates
Common keywords to explore
18

19. @shitaesy Je me couche à 20h30 en ce
moment.. J'ai même lu ce soir :3 #exploit
 Scanning across a sample of the
tweets, some are spam and should be
filtered out
 Can we create a classifier that will get rid
of the non-exploit tweets?
Must Remove the Non-Tweets

20. • Attributes
Initial model developed Attribute can be
with training data
1 boolean or
numeric
• Most useful if
Attribute independent
2 of other
attributes
• The fewer
Model accuracy checked Attribute the
on training data, but later
3 attributes
cross-validated on new data
the better
Anatomy of a Classifier

21. write.table(expDF, sep=",",
file="exploitData.csv")
# I looked at the tweets and added
# training data, using my judgment to code
# the non-tweets
truExp = read.table("truExp.txt")
# Add to the existing data
expDFtrue = cbind(expDF, truExp)
# Note: new variable name defaults to “V1”
Create and Add Training Data

22. # Create true/false values for each row,
# based on whether the string exists
expDFtrue$hassec =
grepl("security",tolower(expDFtrue$text))
# Also count some punctuation to see if
# there are clues there
expDFtrue$numhash =
sapply(strsplit(as.character(expDFtrue$te
xt),"#"),length)-1
Easy Predictors with Grepl()

23. Coefficients (output from Logit analysis:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) 2.946e+00 1.904e+00 1.547 0.12187
hassecTRUE 2.302e+00 1.186e+00 1.941 0.05222 .
hassqlTRUE 1.770e+01 4.076e+03 0.004 0.99653
hasbufTRUE -2.476e+00 1.124e+00 -2.203 0.02757 *
hasscrTRUE 1.832e+01 4.135e+03 0.004 0.99647
hasremTRUE -3.075e-01 1.109e+00 -0.277 0.78164
hascybTRUE 1.202e+00 1.958e+00 0.614 0.53937
numhash -2.046e+00 7.218e-01 -2.835 0.00458 **
numast -2.182e+01 5.554e+03 -0.004 0.99687
numdot 6.306e-01 4.167e-01 1.513 0.13017
twtlen 6.548e-03 2.329e-02 0.281 0.77854
# security, buffer keywords are promising, as well as the
# number of hash marks and the number of dots/periods
Choose Best Attributes

24. library(rpart) numhash>=2.5
|
1
fit <- rpart(V1 ~ hassec + 26/71
hasbuf + numhash + numdot,
method="class",
data=expDFtrue)
summary(fit)
plot(fit, uniform=TRUE,
margin=0.1, branch=0.5,
compress=TRUE)
text(fit, use.n=TRUE, all=TRUE,
cex=.8) 0 1
14/2 12/69
“numhash” only retained attribute, split at 2.5
Overall 14 errors (83/97 = 85.5% correct)
12 false positives (12/97 = 12.4% FP)
2 false negatives (2/97 = 2.1% FN)
Classification Tree Works OK
24

25.  Conclusion 1: R is pretty handy for grabbing and manipulating
tweet data
 Conclusion 2: Tweet data are messy and require a good deal of
clean-up, parsing, and filtering
 Conclusion 3: As these two examples suggest, tweets can provide
breaking news about vulnerabilities and exploits
◦ WordPress Age Verification plugin versions 0.4 and below open redirect
vulnerability
 Exploit availability tweeted at 12:19 PM
 Blogged at SecurityBlog 10:24 PM
 Added to SiloBreaker two days later
◦ Pragyan CMS v 3.0 Remote File Disclosure
 Exploit availability tweeted at 11:07 AM
 Appeared on PacketStorm next day
 On RealHacker three days later
 On WebCriminal.ru eight days later
Twitter: Early Warning System?

26. Image from: http://www.vincegolangco.com