Cybersecurity Discourse in Online Communities

In the current cybersecurity landscape, online discussion groups serve as essential collaborative spaces for knowledge exchange among professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts. Cooperation among participants and the sharing of experiences are critical for identifying and understanding cyber threats, enabling the rapid and effective adoption of preventive and corrective measures. Accordingly, this study aims to analyze the main cybersecurity trends discussed in online groups within specialized virtual communities, such as Reddit and Discord. The central research question guiding the analysis was: What are the main cybersecurity trends discussed in online groups? The data analyzed consist of posts, interactions, and debates extracted from online communities dedicated to cybersecurity, covering the period from 2022 to 2025 and totaling 2,108,803 raw records. To organize and process the data, IRaMuTeQ (Interface of R for Multidimensional Analysis of Texts and Questionnaires) was employed, enabling lexical analysis and multivariate statistical analysis of the corpus. Subsequently, QualiGPT was used to further deepen and interpret the results associated with the identified thematic classes. The findings contribute to the ongoing debate on cybersecurity trends by offering new insights into the challenges, practices, and impacts present in specialized virtual environments. The analyses indicate that these spaces function as environments for collaborative learning and professional development. Discussions ranged from digital defense practices to career pathways, highlighting the close integration of theory and practice within the cybersecurity field.