An APT Event Extraction Method Based on BERT-BiGRU-CRF for APT Attack Detection

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) seriously threatens a nation's cyberspace security. Current defense technologies are typically unable to detect it effectively since APT attack is complex and the signatures for detection are not clear. To enhance the understanding of APT attacks, in this paper, a novel approach for extracting APT attack events from web texts is proposed. First, the APT event types and event schema are defined. Secondly, an APT attack event extraction dataset in Chinese is constructed. Finally, an APT attack event extraction model based on the BERT-BiGRU-CRF architecture is proposed. Comparative experiments are conducted with ERNIE, BERT, and BERT-BiGRU-CRF models, and the results show that the APT attack event extraction model based on BERT-BiGRU-CRF achieves the highest F1 value, indicating the best extraction performance. Currently, there is seldom APT event extraction research, the work in this paper contributes a new method to Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) analysis. By considering the multi-stages, complexity of APT attacks, and the data source from huge credible web texts, the APT event extraction method enhances the understanding of APT attacks and is helpful to improve APT attack detection capabilities.