Dissecting the Learning Behaviors in Hacker Forums

It is a consensus that there exists learning barriers to become a skilled hacker. Hack forums are believed to be indispensable venues where to overcome these barriers. However, this belief has not been formally justified in academia. By studying post content, we find evidence of different posting behaviors in hack forums. One interesting result is that there are indeed some learning behaviors exhibited by the changes in posting behaviors of forum users. Our results show that information exchange with regard to security knowledge is occurring in public forums, which contradicts to the common perception of hackers’ mystique. Keyword: text mining, hack forum, learning behavior, supervised classification.