What are the Latest Cybersecurity Trends? A Case Study Grounded in Language Models

Cristiana Vladescu, Maria-Alexandra Dinisor, Octavian Grigorescu, Dragos Corlatescu, Cristian Sandescu, Mihai Dascalu

Abstract: The year 2020 marked an important moment when the COVID-19 pandemic promoted Internet as a necessity even more than before, especially for school activities and businesses. This increased usage emphasized the importance of cybersecurity, a frequently overlooked subject by the common users, which in return plays a crucial role in safe Internet browsing. This paper introduces an approach grounded in Natural Language Processing techniques to identify the main trends in security news and empowers the analysis of vulnerable products, active attacks, as well as existing methods of defence against new attacks. Our dataset consists of 2264 news articles published on cybersecurity dedicated websites between January 2017 and May 2021. The RoBERTa language model was used to compute the texts embeddings, followed by dimensionality reduction techniques and topic clustering methods. Articles were grouped into approximately 20 clusters that were thoroughly evaluated in terms of importance and evolution.