The Australian Cyber Security Centre threat report 2015

Introduction: The number, type and sophistication of cyber security threats to Australia and Australians are increasing. Due to the varied nature of motivations for cyber adversaries targeting Australian organisations, organisations could be a target for malicious activities even if they do not think the information held on their networks is valuable, or that their business would be of interest to cyber adversaries. This first unclassified report by the ACSC describes the range of cyber adversaries targeting Australian networks, explains their motivations, the malicious activities they are conducting and their impact, and provides specific examples of activity targeting Australian networks during 2014. This report also offers mitigation advice on how organisations can defend against these activities. The ACSC’s ability to detect and defend against sophisticated cyber threats continues to improve. But cyber adversaries are constantly improving their tradecraft in their attempts to defeat our network defences and exploit the new technologies we embrace. There are gaps in our understanding of the extent and nature of malicious activity, particularly against the business sector. The ACSC is reaching out to industry to build partnerships to improve our collective understanding. Future iterations of the Threat Report will benefit from these partnerships and help to close gaps in our knowledge

Fighting Cybercrime After \u3cem\u3eUnited States v. Jones\u3c/em\u3e

In a landmark non-decision last term, five Justices of the United States Supreme Court would have held that citizens possess a Fourth Amendment right to expect that certain quantities of information about them will remain private, even if they have no such expectations with respect to any of the information or data constituting that whole. This quantitative approach to evaluating and protecting Fourth Amendment rights is certainly novel and raises serious conceptual, doctrinal, and practical challenges. In other works, we have met these challenges by engaging in a careful analysis of this “mosaic theory” and by proposing that courts focus on the technologies that make collecting and aggregating large quantities of information possible. In those efforts, we focused on reasonable expectations held by “the people” that they will not be subjected to broad and indiscriminate surveillance. These expectations are anchored in Founding-era concerns about the capacity for unfettered search powers to promote an authoritarian surveillance state. Although we also readily acknowledged that there are legitimate and competing governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in the deployment and use of surveillance technologies that implicate reasonable interests in quantitative privacy, we did little more. In this Article, we begin to address that omission by focusing on the legitimate governmental and law enforcement interests at stake in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting cyber-harassment and healthcare fraud

Cybercrime Pervasiveness, Consequences, and Sustainable Counter Strategies

As our connectivity and dependency on technology increases, so does our vulnerability. Technology has provided not only new tools, but also new opportunities for criminals in the digital world. The abuse of new technologies has been threatening economic and Jinancial security and actually devastating the lives of affected indivicluals. In Nigeria, cybercrime has recorded mostly foregin-based individuals and organizations as victims thereby getting Nigeria ranked among the nations with notorious pemasiveness of high-tech crimes. Indeed, adequately formulating a strategy to contain the menace of cybercrime presents aformidable challenge to law enforcement. This paper x-rays noted instances of cybercrime pervasiveness, its devastating consequences, and up-to-date countermeasures in Nigeria It develops an enforceable/sustainable framework to determine how critical infrastructures are put at risk snd how law enforcement should react in responding to the threats

NEMESYS: Enhanced Network Security for Seamless Service Provisioning in the Smart Mobile Ecosystem

As a consequence of the growing popularity of smart mobile devices, mobile malware is clearly on the rise, with attackers targeting valuable user information and exploiting vulnerabilities of the mobile ecosystems. With the emergence of large-scale mobile botnets, smartphones can also be used to launch attacks on mobile networks. The NEMESYS project will develop novel security technologies for seamless service provisioning in the smart mobile ecosystem, and improve mobile network security through better understanding of the threat landscape. NEMESYS will gather and analyze information about the nature of cyber-attacks targeting mobile users and the mobile network so that appropriate counter-measures can be taken. We will develop a data collection infrastructure that incorporates virtualized mobile honeypots and a honeyclient, to gather, detect and provide early warning of mobile attacks and better understand the modus operandi of cyber-criminals that target mobile devices. By correlating the extracted information with the known patterns of attacks from wireline networks, we will reveal and identify trends in the way that cyber-criminals launch attacks against mobile devices.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS'13); 9 pages; 1 figur