CyberSecNews DE/EN Data Set

This dataset contains 457 news articles in German and English, collected via RSS feeds from various news websites and blogs, that were publicly accessible at the time of collection. The articles cover a range of subjects, from general topics such as finance, sports, politics, etc. to content from cybersecurity-specific websites and blogs.

In a small survey, the content of each article was then presented to colleagues from the Center for Digital Safety and Security at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) via a browser-based application. Each participant was instructed to classify the presented article into one of two categories: "Cybersecurity" or "Not Cybersecurity", with the option of marking articles as "Unsure". The detailed instructions can be found: here

Detailed information

Data set stored in .csv and .json formats

All news articles were published between 2014-07-10 and 2025-04-28. For copyright information, see the column "copyright_statement".  

Number of rows: 457

Column Information:

• title: The title of the published news article as utf-8 encoded string
• content: The article itself as utf-8 encoded string
• language: The language of the article, "de" or "en"
• source_name: The news website's name
• source_url: The URL of the RSS feed used to fetch the articles
• published: The timestamp of when the article was published, according to the RSS feed (UTC+0)
• copyright_statement: The copyright statement, either obtained from the RSS feed or fetched from the news website. Where no copyright statement was provided, a generic placeholder was instead used.
• classifications: The results of the manual classification of each participant (anonymized) per news article. The results are in the format {"UserX": "yes/no/unsure", ...}
• cybersecurity: The final label for each news article. Can be "yes", "no" or "unsure". Obtained from the "classifications" column via the following condition:
  • If only "yes" in classifications -> "yes"
  • If only "no" in classifications -> "no"
  • If "unsure" in classifications -> "unsure"
  • If "yes" and "no" in classifications -> "unsure"

Missing Values: None

Acknowledgments:

Funded by the European Union under GA no. 101121403 (NEWSROOM), GA no. 101121418 (EUCINF), and GA no. 101168092 (ECYSAP EYE). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. Co-funded by the Austrian FFG Kiras project ASOC (905301).