Propuesta teórico práctica del ciclo de vida del Grooming desde el punto de vista de un ataque APT (Advanced Persistent Threat)

Abstract

In the field of Information Security, there are several areas of study that are under development. Social Engineering is one of them, which addresses the multidisciplinary challenges of Cyber Security. Nowadays, the attacks associated with Social Engineering are diverse, including the so called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). These have been the subject of numerous investigations; however, cybernetic attacks of similar nature as Grooming have been excluded from these studies. In the last decade, various efforts have been made to understand the structure and approach of Grooming from the field of Computer Science with the use of computational learning algorithms. Nevertheless, these studies are not aligned with the Information Security field. In this work, the study of Grooming is formalized as a Social Engineering attack, contrasting its stages or phases with life cycles associated with APTs. To achieve this goal, we use a database of real cyberpedophile chats; this information is refined and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling is applied to determine the stages of the attack. Once the number of stages is determined, we proceed to give them a linguistic context, and with the use of machine learning, a linear model is trained to obtain 97.6% of training accuracy. With these results, it is determined that the study of Grooming could support research associated with Social Engineering and contribute to new fields of study for Information Security.