Time for aCTIon: Automated Analysis of Cyber Threat Intelligence in the Wild
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Abstract (arXiv)
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) plays a crucial role in assessing risks and enhancing security for organizations. However, the process of extracting relevant information from unstructured text sources can be expensive and time-consuming. Our empirical experience shows that existing tools for automated structured CTI extraction have performance limitations. Furthermore, the community lacks a common benchmark to quantitatively assess their performance. We fill these gaps providing a new large open benchmark dataset and aCTIon, a structured CTI information extraction tool. The dataset includes 204 real-world publicly available reports and their corresponding structured CTI information in STIX format. Our team curated the dataset involving three independent groups of CTI analysts working over the course of several months. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is two orders of magnitude larger than previously released open source datasets. We then design aCTIon, leveraging recently introduced large language models (GPT3.5) in the context of two custom information extraction pipelines. We compare our method with 10 solutions presented in previous work, for which we develop our own implementations when open-source implementations were lacking. Our results show that aCTIon outperforms previous work for structured CTI extraction with an improvement of the F1-score from 10%points to 50%points across all tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 32 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2023.
Builds on
32 of 63 references.
References · 32
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 6; 2025: 5; 2026: 4.
15 papers.
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- 2024When LLMs Meet Cybersecurity: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 71
- 2024Large Language Models for Cyber Security: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 68
- 2024LLMCloudHunter: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Extraction of Detection Rules from Cloud-Based CTIcited by 18
- 2025ExCyTIn-Bench: Evaluating LLM agents on Cyber Threat Investigationcited by 15
- 2024Actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence using Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Modelscited by 14
- 2024CTINexus: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Modelscited by 14
- 2025Large Language Models for Security Operations Centers: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 9
- 2024AI-Driven Cyber Threat Intelligence Automationcited by 2
- 2025Towards AI-Driven Human-Machine Co-Teaming for Adaptive and Agile Cyber Security Operation Centerscited by 2
- 2026CyberThreat-Eval: Can Large Language Models Automate Real-World Threat Research?cited by 2
- 2026TACTIC-KG: Toward Small Agent Teams for Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 1
- 2025Large Language Models for Explainable Threat Intelligencecited by 0
3 more
- 2025CTIGuardian: A Few-Shot Framework for Mitigating Privacy Leakage in Fine-Tuned LLMscited by 0
- 2026Evaluating Open-Weight LLMs for Generating Structured Threat Information for Autonomous Vehicle Vulnerabilitiescited by 0
- 2026SCRIPTIOC-BENCH: A Benchmark for Recognizing Actionable Threat Intelligence from Script-Based Malware using LLMscited by 0
- 2026SCRIPTIOC-BENCH: A Benchmark for Recognizing Actionable Threat Intelligence from Script-Based Malware using LLMs5 Sep 2026
- 2026Evaluating Open-Weight LLMs for Generating Structured Threat Information for Autonomous Vehicle Vulnerabilities17 Jul 2026
- 2026TACTIC-KG: Toward Small Agent Teams for Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction6 Jul 2026
- 2026CyberThreat-Eval: Can Large Language Models Automate Real-World Threat Research?10 Mar 2026
- 2025CTIGuardian: A Few-Shot Framework for Mitigating Privacy Leakage in Fine-Tuned LLMs15 Dec 2025
- 2025Large Language Models for Explainable Threat Intelligence7 Nov 2025
- 2025Large Language Models for Security Operations Centers: A Comprehensive Survey13 Sep 2025
- 2025ExCyTIn-Bench: Evaluating LLM agents on Cyber Threat Investigation14 Jul 2025
- 2025Towards AI-Driven Human-Machine Co-Teaming for Adaptive and Agile Cyber Security Operation Centers9 May 2025
- 2024CTINexus: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models28 Oct 2024
- 2024AI-Driven Cyber Threat Intelligence Automation26 Oct 2024
- 2024LLMCloudHunter: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Extraction of Detection Rules from Cloud-Based CTI6 Jul 2024
- 2024When LLMs Meet Cybersecurity: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 71
- 2024Large Language Models for Cyber Security: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 68
- 2024LLMCloudHunter: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Extraction of Detection Rules from Cloud-Based CTIcited by 18
- 2024Actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence using Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Modelscited by 14
- 2024CTINexus: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Modelscited by 14
- 2025Large Language Models for Security Operations Centers: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 9
- 2024AI-Driven Cyber Threat Intelligence Automationcited by 2
- 2025Towards AI-Driven Human-Machine Co-Teaming for Adaptive and Agile Cyber Security Operation Centerscited by 2
- 2026CyberThreat-Eval: Can Large Language Models Automate Real-World Threat Research?cited by 2
- 2026Evaluating Open-Weight LLMs for Generating Structured Threat Information for Autonomous Vehicle Vulnerabilitiescited by 0
- 2026SCRIPTIOC-BENCH: A Benchmark for Recognizing Actionable Threat Intelligence from Script-Based Malware using LLMscited by 0
- 2026SCRIPTIOC-BENCH: A Benchmark for Recognizing Actionable Threat Intelligence from Script-Based Malware using LLMs5 Sep 2026
- 2026Evaluating Open-Weight LLMs for Generating Structured Threat Information for Autonomous Vehicle Vulnerabilities17 Jul 2026
- 2026CyberThreat-Eval: Can Large Language Models Automate Real-World Threat Research?10 Mar 2026
- 2025Large Language Models for Security Operations Centers: A Comprehensive Survey13 Sep 2025
- 2025Towards AI-Driven Human-Machine Co-Teaming for Adaptive and Agile Cyber Security Operation Centers9 May 2025
- 2024CTINexus: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models28 Oct 2024
- 2024AI-Driven Cyber Threat Intelligence Automation26 Oct 2024
- 2024LLMCloudHunter: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Extraction of Detection Rules from Cloud-Based CTI6 Jul 2024
- 2024Actionable Cyber Threat Intelligence using Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models30 Jun 2024
- 2024Large Language Models for Cyber Security: A Systematic Literature Review8 May 2024
- 2024When LLMs Meet Cybersecurity: A Systematic Literature Review6 May 2024