Do hacker forums contribute to security attacks?

There has been an increased amount of discussion about firms needing to account for the hacker's perspective in protecting their information assets. However, we still have very little idea about how attack information is disseminated within the hacker community. In this paper, we study the role of hacker forums in disseminating vulnerability information that leads to attacks. We found that the discussions in online hacker forums correlate significantly with the number of cyber-attacks observed in the real world. Furthermore, hacker forums also play a moderating role in disseminating vulnerability and threat information. As cyber security becomes an increasingly prominent issue for firms, our study indicates that there is a need to study the behaviors of the participants in the hacker forum further in order to better understand the risks that they pose. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.