An approach to preventing spam using Access Codes with a combination of anti-spam mechanisms

Spam is becoming a more and more severe problem for individuals, networks, organisations and businesses. The losses caused by spam are billions of dollars every year. Research shows that spam contributes more than 80% of e-mails with an increased in its growth rate every year. Spam is not limited to emails; it has started affecting other technologies like VoIP, cellular and traditional telephony, and instant messaging services. None of the approaches (including legislative, collaborative, social awareness and technological) separately or in combination with other approaches, can prevent sufficient of the spam to be deemed a solution to the spam problem. The severity of the spam problem and the limitations of the state-of-the-Art solutions create a strong need for an efficient anti-spam mechanism that can prevent significant volumes of spam without showing any false positives. This can be achieved by an efficient anti-spam mechanism such as the proposed anti-spam mechanism known as "Spam Prevention using Access Codes", SPAC. SPAC targets spam from two angles i.e. to prevent/block spam and to discourage spammers by making the infrastructure environment very unpleasant for them. In addition to the idea of Access Codes, SPAC combines the ideas behind some of the key current technological anti-spam measures to increase effectiveness. The difference in this work is that SPAC uses those ideas effectively and combines them in a unique way which enables SPAC to acquire the good features of a number of technological anti-spam approaches without showing any of the drawbacks of these approaches. Sybil attacks, Dictionary attacks and address spoofing have no impact on the performance of SPAC. In fact SPAC functions in a similar way (i.e. as for unknown persons) for these sorts of attacks. An application known as the "SPAC application" has been developed to test the performance of the SPAC mechanism. The results obtained from various tests on the SPAC application show that SPAC has a clear edge over the existing anti-spam technological approaches

Consumer-facing technology fraud : economics, attack methods and potential solutions

The emerging use of modern technologies has not only benefited society but also attracted fraudsters and criminals to misuse the technology for financial benefits. Fraud over the Internet has increased dramatically, resulting in an annual loss of billions of dollars to customers and service providers worldwide. Much of such fraud directly impacts individuals, both in the case of browser-based and mobile-based Internet services, as well as when using traditional telephony services, either through landline phones or mobiles. It is important that users of the technology should be both informed of fraud, as well as protected from frauds through fraud detection and prevention systems. In this paper, we present the anatomy of frauds for different consumer-facing technologies from three broad perspectives - we discuss Internet, mobile and traditional telecommunication, from the perspectives of losses through frauds over the technology, fraud attack mechanisms and systems used for detecting and preventing frauds. The paper also provides recommendations for securing emerging technologies from fraud and attacks

Consumer-facing technology fraud: Economics, attack methods and potential solutions

The emerging use of modern technologies has not only benefited society but also attracted fraudsters and criminals to misuse the technology for financial benefits. Fraud over the Internet has increased dramatically, resulting in an annual loss of billions of dollars to customers and service providers worldwide. Much of such fraud directly impacts individuals, both in the case of browser-based and mobile-based Internet services, as well as when using traditional telephony services, either through landline phones or mobiles. It is important that users of the technology should be both informed of fraud, as well as protected from frauds through fraud detection and prevention systems. In this paper, we present the anatomy of frauds for different consumer-facing technologies from three broad perspectives - we discuss Internet, mobile and traditional telecommunication, from the perspectives of losses through frauds over the technology, fraud attack mechanisms and systems used for detecting and preventing frauds. The paper also provides recommendations for securing emerging technologies from fraud and attacks.N/

Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructures

This book contains the manuscripts that were accepted for publication in the MDPI Special Topic "Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure" after a rigorous peer-review process. Authors from academia, government and industry contributed their innovative solutions, consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity. The book contains 16 articles: an editorial explaining current challenges, innovative solutions, real-world experiences including critical infrastructure, 15 original papers that present state-of-the-art innovative solutions to attacks on critical systems, and a review of cloud, edge computing, and fog's security and privacy issues

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse