# HackerScope: The Dynamics of a Massive Hacker Online Ecosystem

**Authors:** Risul Islam, Md Omar Faruk Rokon, Ahmad Darki, Michalis Faloutsos  
**arXiv:** [2011.07222](https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07222)  
**Date:** 2020-11-14  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2011.07222v1/

## Key points

- Authors' study focuses on malicious software developers and their online footprint
- Utilizes HackerScope to analyze collaborative patterns and identify influential authors
- Three network representations: author-author, author-repository, cross-platform egonets
- Reveals insights such as accelerating growth of new malware authors every two years and high collaboration levels
- Statistics and trends module uncovers distributions and behaviors of malware authors
- Small percentage of authors contribute significantly more malware repositories than others
- Malware repositories forked at higher rate compared to regular GitHub repositories, indicating increased collaboration
- Tracks ecosystem's growth over time for valuable insights into its evolution

## Summary

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The authors' study delves into the world of malicious software developers, providing insight into their visible online footprint. They focus on analyzing collaborative patterns and identifying influential authors within this hacker ecosystem. Through their systematic approach, HackerScope, which gathers data from multiple sources including GitHub, security forums, and internet searches, they synthesize a comprehensive view of author behaviors. This includes three network representations - the author-author network, the author-repository network, and cross-platform egonets - revealing key insights such as the accelerating growth of new malware authors every two years and high levels of collaboration within the community. Their approach also includes a statistics and trends module that uncovers intriguing findings about malware authors' distributions and behaviors. For example, they observe that a small percentage of authors contribute significantly more malware repositories than others, with some even amassing a large number of followers. Additionally, malware repositories are forked at a much higher rate compared to regular GitHub repositories, indicating increased collaboration among hackers in this community. The study also tracks trends in the ecosystem's growth over time, providing valuable insights into its evolution. Overall, this research represents a significant step towards understanding the dynamics of the malicious hacker community through public online information. By synthesizing multi-source data and modeling complex interactions among authors and repositories, the authors offer a detailed analysis that can benefit researchers and security analysts seeking to combat cyber threats effectively.