Survey on remnant data research: the artefacts recovered and the implications in a cyber security conscious world

The prevalence of remnant data in second hand storage media is well documented. Since 2004 there have been ten separate papers released through Edith Cowan University alone. Despite numerous government agencies providing advice on securing personal and corporate information, and news articles highlighting the need for data security, the availability of personal and confidential data on second hand storage devices is continuing, indicating a systemic laissez faire attitude to data security, even in our supposedly cyber security conscious world. The research continues, but there seems to be a lack of correlation of these studies to identify trends or common themes amongst the results. The fact that this type of research continues to be conducted highlights the deficiencies in the methods used to advertise warnings publicised by Government departments and industry experts. Major media organisations seem reluctant to broadcast these warnings, unless there is a bigger story behind the issue. This paper highlights the ongoing issues and provides insight to the factors contributing to this growing trend

Connecting the dots: information visualization and text analysis of the Searchlight Project newsletters

This report is the product of the Pardee Center’s work on the Searchlight:Visualization and Analysis of Trend Data project sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Part of a larger effort to analyze and disseminate on-the-ground information about important societal trends as reported in a large number of regional newsletters developed in Asia, Africa and the Americas specifically for the Foundation, the Pardee Center developed sophisticated methods to systematically review, categorize, analyze, visualize, and draw conclusions from the information in the newsletters.The Rockefeller Foundatio

The macro-environment for liquid biofuels in the US mass media, science and government

The purpose of this study is to investigate under which dimensions the macro-environment for liquid biofuels has been structured during time, respectively by science, mass media, and government in Germany, and how these three social expressions related to each other. Research was carried out on German official government documents, mass media news, and scientific papers on the topic ‘liquid biofuels’. Text Mining was used to extract knowledge from their content. The results indicate that in configurating the macro-environment for liquid biofuels there is some degree of proximity between media and government, less between media and science, and the least between government and scienc

Are Formal Corporate News Announcements Still Newsworthy? Evidence from Three Decades of U.S. Data on Earnings, Splits, and Dividends

This paper considers the share price reaction to dividend, earnings, and stock split announcements over a 30 year period. It first considers whether there is differential information content in similar corporate news announcements for different types of firms. Second, it investigates whether the value of news information about these firms has declined over time (has become “less newsworthy”). We categorize firms into groups by whether corporate news announcements regarding the firms will be more valuable to the public. For example, since the public may know more about larger firms, we expect the market to react less strongly (in absolute value) to new information from large firms. We find strong support for this idea. We find little evidence that is consistent with the idea that “news is less newsworthy” over the past few decades. Although, we do find that the share price reaction to “good” dividend news has become less positive and to “bad” dividend news has become less negative over time, no such related evidence exists for stock splits and earnings announcements. Additional investigation of entire distributions of returns using kernel density estimators also rejects the “news is no longer newsworthy” idea

Studying Ransomware Attacks Using Web Search Logs

Cyber attacks are increasingly becoming prevalent and causing significant damage to individuals, businesses and even countries. In particular, ransomware attacks have grown significantly over the last decade. We do the first study on mining insights about ransomware attacks by analyzing query logs from Bing web search engine. We first extract ransomware related queries and then build a machine learning model to identify queries where users are seeking support for ransomware attacks. We show that user search behavior and characteristics are correlated with ransomware attacks. We also analyse trends in the temporal and geographical space and validate our findings against publicly available information. Lastly, we do a case study on 'Nemty', a popular ransomware, to show that it is possible to derive accurate insights about cyber attacks by query log analysis.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of SIGIR 202