Multi-level fine-tuning, data augmentation, and few-shot learning for specialized cyber threat intelligence

Gathering cyber threat intelligence from open sources is becoming increasingly important for maintaining and achieving a high level of security as systems become larger and more complex. However, these open sources are often subject to information overload. It is therefore useful to apply machine learning models that condense the amount of information to what is necessary. Yet, previous studies and applications have shown that existing classifiers are not able to process information about emerging cybersecurity events, such as new malware names or novel attack contexts, due to their low generalisation capability. Therefore, we propose a system to overcome this problem by training a new classifier for each new incident. Since this requires a lot of labelled data using standard training methods, we combine three different low-data regime techniques – transfer learning, data augmentation, and few-shot learning – to train a high-quality classifier from very few labelled instances. We evaluated our approach using a novel dataset derived from the Microsoft Exchange Server data breach of 2021 which was labelled by three experts. Our findings reveal an increase in F1 score of more than 21 points compared to standard training methods and more than 18 points compared to a state-of-the-art method in few-shot learning. Furthermore, the classifier trained with this method and 32 instances is only less than 5 F1 score points worse than a classifier trained with 1800 instances.