A Study on Improving the Automatic Classification Performance of Cybersecurity MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Using NLP-Based ModernBERT and BERTopic Models
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports are key resources for identifying the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) of hackers and hacking groups. However, these reports are lengthy and unstructured, presenting limitations for automatic mapping to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. In this study, we designed and compared the performance of five hybrid classification models concatenating statistical-based features (TF-IDF), transformer-based contextual embeddings (BERT, ModernBERT), and topic-based representations (BERTopic) to automatically classify CTI reports into 12 ATT&CK tactic categories. Experiments using the rcATT dataset, comprising 1,490 public threat reports, showed that the model concatenating TF-IDF and ModernBERT achieved a micro-precision of 72.25%, demonstrating a 10.07 percentage point improvement in detection precision compared to the baseline paper. Furthermore, the model concatenating TF-IDF and BERTopic achieved a micro F₀.₅ of 67.14% and a macro F₀.₅ of 63.20%, representing a 6.27 percentage point improvement over the baseline paper, significantly enhancing detection performance for imbalanced classes and rare tactics. Academically, this study demonstrates that a hybrid approach integrating statistical, contextual, and semantic information can simultaneously improve precision and balance compared to existing CTI analysis techniques. Industrially, it demonstrated the practical applicability of the model to enhance detection efficiency and reduce analyst workload in Security Operations Center (SOC), adversary emulation, and Threat-informed Defense environments.
Source: Electronics
Institution: Yonsei University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W4416226700