Prediction of Future Nation-initiated Cyberattacks from News-based Political Event Graph

Bishal Lakha, Jason Duran, Edoardo Serra, Francesca Spezzano

Abstract: In the world of cyber defense, anticipating potential attacks or any increase in risk of attacks is one of the most advantageous pieces of knowledge one can have. However, little research has been done in examining the larger geopolitical environment and using data sources available at the geopolitical level to predict cyberattacks in advance. To this end, we combine the use of a geopolitical conflict dataset, ICEWS, in combination with a cyberattack dataset from the Council on Foreign Relations to determine if we can predict cyberattacks targeting a given nation. We present a novel approach to identify periods of increased likelihood of cyberattacks at the country, regional, and global levels. The approach involves creating a news-based political event graph, generating vectorial representations of the graph using the SIR-GN structural iterative representation learning approach, and applying novelty detection models to predict future nation-initiated attacks. The proposed approach outperforms existing baselines for majority of cases in terms of F1-score, demonstrating its effectiveness in predicting cyberattacks.