# Is the Digital Forensics and Incident Response Pipeline Ready for Text-Based Threats in LLM Era?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17870 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17870/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [A Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10226/) (2023)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02003/) (2023)
- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [BadNL: Backdoor Attacks against NLP Models with Semantic-preserving Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01043/) (2020)
- [DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05540/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01314/) (2020)
- [From ChatGPT to ThreatGPT: Impact of Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00691/) (2023)
- [MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13242/) (2023)
- [TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13296/) (2021)
- [TweepFake: about Detecting Deepfake Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00036/) (2020)
- [MGTBench: Benchmarking Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14822/) (2023)
- [Machine Generated Text: A Comprehensive Survey of Threat Models and Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07321/) (2022)
- [Contrasting Linguistic Patterns in Human and LLM-Generated News Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09067/) (2023)
- [Multiscale Positive-Unlabeled Detection of AI-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18149/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Model Detectors with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19713/) (2023)
- [Attribution and Obfuscation of Neural Text Authorship: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10488/) (2022)
- [GRUEN for Evaluating Linguistic Quality of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02498/) (2020)
- [Deepfake Text Detection: Limitations and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09421/) (2022)
- [Overview of AuTexTification at IberLEF 2023: Detection and Attribution of Machine-Generated Text in Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11285/) (2023)
- [Token Prediction as Implicit Classification to Identify LLM-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08723/) (2023)
- [Humanizing Machine-Generated Content: Evading AI-Text Detection through Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01907/) (2024)
- [From Text to Source: Results in Detecting Large Language Model-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13322/) (2023)
- [Whodunit? Learning to Contrast for Authorship Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11887/) (2022)
- [Fingerprinting Fine-tuned Language Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01703/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TxRay: Agentic Postmortem of Live Blockchain Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01317/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the era of generative AI, the widespread adoption of Neural Text Generators (NTGs) presents new cybersecurity challenges, particularly within the realms of Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR). These challenges primarily involve the detection and attribution of sources behind advanced attacks like spearphishing and disinformation campaigns. As NTGs evolve, the task of distinguishing between human and NTG-authored texts becomes critically complex. This paper rigorously evaluates the DFIR pipeline tailored for text-based security systems, specifically focusing on the challenges of detecting and attributing authorship of NTG-authored texts. By introducing a novel human-NTG co-authorship text attack, termed CS-ACT, our study uncovers significant vulnerabilities in traditional DFIR methodologies, highlighting discrepancies between ideal scenarios and real-world conditions. Utilizing 14 diverse datasets and 43 unique NTGs, up to the latest GPT-4, our research identifies substantial vulnerabilities in the forensic profiling phase, particularly in attributing authorship to NTGs. Our comprehensive evaluation points to factors such as model sophistication and the lack of distinctive style within NTGs as significant contributors for these vulnerabilities. Our findings underscore the necessity for more sophisticated and adaptable strategies, such as incorporating adversarial learning, stylizing NTGs, and implementing hierarchical attribution through the mapping of NTG lineages to enhance source attribution. This sets the stage for future research and the development of more resilient text-based security systems.
