| Abstract: | Ethical hacking and vulnerability assessments are gaining rapid momentum as academic fields of study. Still, it is sometimes unclear what research areas are included in the categories and how they fit into the traditional academic framework. Previous studies have reviewed literature in the field, but the attempts use manual analysis and thus fail to provide a comprehensive view of the domain. To better understand how the area is treated within academia, 537,629 related articles from the Scopus database were analyzed. A Python script was used for data mining as well as analysis of the data, and 23,459 articles were included in the final synthesis. The publication dates of the articles ranged from 1975 to 2022. They were authored by 53,495 authors and produced an aggregated total of 836,956 citations. Fifteen research communities were detected using the Louvain community detection algorithm: (smart grids, attack graphs, security testing, software vulnerabilities, Internet of Things (IoT), network vulnerability, vulnerability analysis, Android, cascading failures, authentication, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), spoofing attacks, malware, trust models, and red teaming). In addition, each community had several individual subcommunities, constituting a total of 126. From the trends of the analyzed studies, it is clear that research interest in ethical hacking and vulnerability assessment is increasing. |
