An automated system to search, track, classify and report sensitive information exposed on an intranet

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015Through time, enterprises have been focusing their main attentions towards cyber attacks against their infrastructures derived from the outside and so they end, somehow, underrating the existing dangers on their internal network. This leads to a low importance given to the information available to every employee connected to the internal network, may it be of a sensitive nature and most likely should not be available to everyone’s access. Currently, the detection of documents with sensitive or confidential information unduly exposed on PTP’s (Portugal Telecom Portugal) internal network is a rather time consuming manual process. This project’s contribution is Hound, an automated system that searches for documents, exposed to all employees, with possible sensitive content and classifies them according to its degree of sensitivity, generating reports with that gathered information. This system was integrated in a PT project of larger dimensions, in order to provide DCY (Cybersecurity Department) with mechanisms to improve its effectiveness on the vulnerability detection area, in terms of exposure of files/documents with sensitive or confidential information in its internal network.Ao longo do tempo, as empresas têm vindo a focar as suas principais atenções para os ataques contra as suas infraestruturas provenientes do exterior acabando por, de certa forma, menosprezar os perigos existentes no interior da sua rede. Isto leva a que não dêem a devida importância à informação que está disponível para todos os funcionários na rede interna, podendo a mesma ser de caráter sensível e que muito provavelmente não deveria estar disponível para o acesso de todos. Atualmente, a deteção de ficheiros com informação sensível ou confidencial indevidamente expostos na rede interna da PTP (Portugal Telecom Portugal) é um processo manual bastante moroso. A contribuição deste projeto é o Hound, um sistema automatizado que procura documentos, expostos aos colaboradores, com conteúdo potencialmente sensível. Estes documentos são classificados de acordo com o seu grau de sensibilidade, gerando relatórios com a informação obtida. Este sistema foi integrado num projeto de maiores dimensões da PT de forma a dotar o Departamento de Cibersegurança dos mecanismos necessários a melhorar a sua eficácia nas áreas de deteção de vulnerabilidades, em termos de exposição de ficheiros/documentos com informação sensível ou confidencial na sua rede interna

Information retrieval and text mining technologies for chemistry

Efficient access to chemical information contained in scientific literature, patents, technical reports, or the web is a pressing need shared by researchers and patent attorneys from different chemical disciplines. Retrieval of important chemical information in most cases starts with finding relevant documents for a particular chemical compound or family. Targeted retrieval of chemical documents is closely connected to the automatic recognition of chemical entities in the text, which commonly involves the extraction of the entire list of chemicals mentioned in a document, including any associated information. In this Review, we provide a comprehensive and in-depth description of fundamental concepts, technical implementations, and current technologies for meeting these information demands. A strong focus is placed on community challenges addressing systems performance, more particularly CHEMDNER and CHEMDNER patents tasks of BioCreative IV and V, respectively. Considering the growing interest in the construction of automatically annotated chemical knowledge bases that integrate chemical information and biological data, cheminformatics approaches for mapping the extracted chemical names into chemical structures and their subsequent annotation together with text mining applications for linking chemistry with biological information are also presented. Finally, future trends and current challenges are highlighted as a roadmap proposal for research in this emerging field.A.V. and M.K. acknowledge funding from the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (project reference: 654021 - OpenMinted). M.K. additionally acknowledges the Encomienda MINETAD-CNIO as part of the Plan for the Advancement of Language Technology. O.R. and J.O. thank the Foundation for Applied Medical Research (FIMA), University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain). This work was partially funded by Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (Xunta de Galicia), and FEDER (European Union), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684). We thank Iñigo Garciá -Yoldi for useful feedback and discussions during the preparation of the manuscript.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Professional Search in Pharmaceutical Research

In the mid 90s, visiting libraries – as means of retrieving the latest literature – was still a common necessity among professionals. Nowadays, professionals simply access information by ‘googling’. Indeed, the name of the Web search engine market leader “Google” became a synonym for searching and retrieving information. Despite the increased popularity of search as a method for retrieving relevant information, at the workplace search engines still do not deliver satisfying results to professionals. Search engines for instance ignore that the relevance of answers (the satisfaction of a searcher’s needs) depends not only on the query (the information request) and the document corpus, but also on the working context (the user’s personal needs, education, etc.). In effect, an answer which might be appropriate to one user might not be appropriate to the other user, even though the query and the document corpus are the same for both. Personalization services addressing the context become therefore more and more popular and are an active field of research. This is only one of several challenges encountered in ‘professional search’: How can the working context of the searcher be incorporated in the ranking process; how can unstructured free-text documents be enriched with semantic information so that the information need can be expressed precisely at query time; how and to which extent can a company’s knowledge be exploited for search purposes; how should data from distributed sources be accessed from into one-single-entry-point. This thesis is devoted to ‘professional search’, i.e. search at the workplace, especially in industrial research and development. We contribute by compiling and developing several approaches for facing the challenges mentioned above. The approaches are implemented into the prototype YASA (Your Adaptive Search Agent) which provides meta-search, adaptive ranking of search results, guided navigation, and which uses domain knowledge to drive the search processes. YASA is deployed in the pharmaceutical research department of Roche in Penzberg – a major pharmaceutical company – in which the applied methods were empirically evaluated. Being confronted with mostly unstructured free-text documents and having barely explicit metadata at hand, we faced a serious challenge. Incorporating semantics (i.e. formal knowledge representation) into the search process can only be as good as the underlying data. Nonetheless, we are able to demonstrate that this issue can be largely compensated by incorporating automatic metadata extraction techniques. The metadata we were able to extract automatically was not perfectly accurate, nor did the ontology we applied contain considerably “rich semantics”. Nonetheless, our results show that already the little semantics incorporated into the search process, suffices to achieve a significant improvement in search and retrieval. We thus contribute to the research field of context-based search by incorporating the working context into the search process – an area which so far has not yet been well studied

Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)

This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion. The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system. The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are outlined