User Privacy and Cyber Threats: Discourse Analysis of Cyber Threat Incidents

This Dissertation focuses on three major studies aimed at addressing user privacy and cyber threats by enabling a discourse analysis of different communities such as social media, cybersecurity practitioners, and dark web community using different techniques of natural language processing validated through annotations and theoretical frames based on Theory of Data Breach Harms and Routine Activity Theory. The upper block represents the cyber threat aspects focused on in this dissertation's essays using the background presented in the lower block. The work focuses on major cyber threats in current times such as data breach and ransomware attacks. Using theoretical and data driven approaches, we conduct a thorough analysis of literature frames that explain different views pertaining to cyber threat incidents and use natural language processing for evaluating discourse in different communities to enable generation of actionable cyber threat insights. Social network communities transmit public concerns and raise awareness about societal issues such as user privacy and cyber threats. Recently, the need for processing public discourse has become a critical research topic of interest. However, the growing volume of unstructured data makes it difficult to process all issues under a single umbrella, causing to overlook central topics of interest, such as privacy and cyber threats. To address challenges of rising data volumes and to evaluate the discourse on user privacy and cyber threat, particularly among users seeking greater cybersecurity protection, we conduct focused empirical analyses of social media, cybersecurity practitioners, and dark web community discourse about user privacy and cyber threat incidents.