Social Media Analytics on Russia-Ukraine Cyber War with Natural Language Processing: Perspectives and Challenges

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the crucial role of social media-based cyber intelligence in understanding Russia's cyber threats during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict. It introduces a multidimensional cyber intelligence framework and utilizes Twitter data (37,386 tweets from 30,706 users in 54 languages, from October 13, 2022, to April 6, 2023) to generate cyber intelligence reports. Leveraging NLP algorithms (language detection, translation, sentiment analysis, TF-IDF, LDA, Porter stemming, n-grams), the study automatically generated cyber intelligence in four dimensions (geopolitical and socioeconomic; targeted victim; psychological and societal; and national priority and concerns). The paper also highlights the challenges in harnessing reliable social-media-based cyber intelligence.

Fahim Sufi