A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of analyzing social media to determine the source of future cyberattacks has been developed by a team of researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.

Together, researchers from these universities have built a chatbot that analyzes sentiment on social media sites — such as X (formerly known as Twitter) — to determine potential cyberthreats.

Source: Sustainability (2023). DOI: 10.3390/su151713178

To accomplish this, the team instructed the chatbot to “tweet” information to engage X users who “tweeted” about news events or holidays, or who retweeted cyberattack news. During a period of three months, the chatbot interacted with roughly 100,000 social media users while sentiment analysis — the gauging of users' feelings, attitudes and moods — was conducted on human responses to the bot's tweets.

"When you examine sentiment analysis on a chatbot through a cybersecurity lens, you are looking for potential hackers," the researchers explained. "Catching hackers using sentiment analysis is challenging, but predictive models can be built to find them. AI can target a particular population to understand its expressions of approval, disapproval, or even intent to harm, attack, or misuse the technology."

The chatbot is detailed in the article, “Developing Chatbots for Cyber Security: Assessing Threats through Sentiment Analysis on Social Media,” which appears in the journal Sustainability.