STINER: Automated Extraction of Strategic Cyber Threat Intelligence from X

Abstract

Strategic Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) focuses on high-level insights, such as identifying targeted industries, attributing attacks to specific ransomware groups, and assessing the scale of data loss. Today, X (formerly Twitter) has become the fastest source for this intelligence, often hosting real-time breach announcements days before formal vendor reports. Converting this raw chatter into actionable intelligence requires navigating a complex linguistic landscape. Conventional Named Entity Recognition (NER) models struggle to parse the informal and highly irregular dialect of social media, creating a blind spot for automated defense systems. To address this challenge, we introduce STINER, a taxonomy and expert-annotated corpus for extracting strategic intelligence from social media streams. We construct a high-quality, expert-annotated dataset of 2,100 real-world alerts and propose a granular taxonomy of eight entity types centered on strategic pivots such as Threat Actor, Sector, and Location. We benchmark nine models across 12 evaluated configurations, spanning general-purpose and domain-adapted encoders, open-schema extraction, and generative LLMs in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. Domain-adapted encoders such as DarkBERT reach a strict F1-score of 89.33%, outperforming both general-purpose baselines and fine-tuned Large Language Models, which additionally incur substantially higher inference latency. Leveraging STINER-DarkBERT, we conduct a European threat landscape analysis for H1 2025. Our results align with official reporting on major targets while highlighting the distinct visibility profile of attacks in Spain, and illustrate how social-media-driven extraction can surface early signals of the SafePay ransomware campaign prior to its retrospective characterization in vendor threat landscape reports.

Accepted at RAID 2026 (29th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses)