Detecting Trending Terms in Cybersecurity Forum Discussions

We present a lightweight method for identifying currently trending terms in relation to a known prior of terms, using a weighted log-odds ratio with an informative prior. We apply this method to a dataset of posts from an English-language underground hacking forum, spanning over ten years of activity, with posts containing misspellings, orthographic variation, acronyms, and slang. Our statistical approach supports analysis of linguistic change and discussion topics over time, without a requirement to train a topic model for each time interval for analysis. We evaluate the approach by comparing the results to TF-IDF using the discounted cumulative gain metric with human annotations, finding our method outperforms TF-IDF on information retrieval.