| Nowadays,the development of internet enables people to spread and obtain a variety of information at a very low cost,whereas the massive and conflicting information bring a huge impact on society.Such a property of information is especially obvious in online hacker forums,a part of users post malicious content to spread techniques of cyber attack,others discuss how to protect the computer system.Due to the gradually serious situation of cyber attack,a few countries have enacted a series of legislations and policies.Being related to spreading attack techniques closely,hacker forums are affected by certain legislations.After malicious contents are censored and deleted,what change occurred to protection discussions?We investigate this research question in the context of the Chinese online hacker forums.On Feb 28,2009,Chinese government enacted the Amended Article 285 in the Criminal Law which criminalizes any provision and distribution of programs or tools for committing cyber-attacks.In order to have a further and overall understanding of hacker community and examine legislations' impact on the knowledge exchange about defense and attack,this paper mainly applies two ways in research: text mining and econometric analysis.In text mining,supervised learning is used to classify a lot of posts in the forum.Meanwhile,this paper uses real data and regression model to analysis the policy's impact on defensive post.We find that some of the forum participants did quit from these public online communities following the law enforcement.More interestingly it also reduces the potential benefit from discussing protection techniques.Meanwhile,the black-hats hackers may take more positive responses to the online hacker forum censorship than the white-hats hackers.Therefore,in order to reduce the information asymmetry in the exchange of cybersecurity knowledge and maintain a stable cyber environment,it is necessary to enact certain policies to advocate discussions about protection techniques. |
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