Analyzing the Perceived Severity of Cybersecurity Threats Reported on Social Media
Table 6: Qualitative severity rankings of vulnerabilities in NVD. (Left) CVSS v2.0 standards and (Right) CVSS v3.0 standards.
['Severity', 'Base Score', 'Severity None', 'Base Score 0.0']
A large corpus of users’ opinions We collect all English tweets that explicitly contain the keyword “vulnerability” within this time period, which results in a total number of 976,180 tweets. 377,468 tweets remain after removing tweets without named entities. National Vulnerability Database (NVD) : NVD is the U.S. government database of software vulnerabilities. Started in 2000, NVD covers over 100,000 vulnerabilities, assigning a unique CVE number for each threat. These CVE numbers serve as common identifiers. NVD uses the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to measure the severity of threats. CVSS currently has two versions: CVSS v2.0 and CVSS v3.0 standards. CVSS v3.0 is the latest version released in July 2015. In our first set of experiments, we compare our forecasted threat severity scores against CVSS ratings from the NVD. We define a threat as being severe if its CVSS score is ≥ 7.0. We use the newest v3.0 scoring system, which was developed to improve v2.0.