3,389 research outputs found
Undermining:social engineering using open source intelligence gathering
Digital deposits are undergoing exponential growth. These may in turn be exploited to support cyber security initiatives through open source intelligence gathering. Open source intelligence itself is a doubleedged sword as the data may be harnessed not only by intelligence services to counter cyber-crime and terrorist activity but also by the perpetrator of criminal activity who use them to socially engineer online activity and undermine their victims. Our preliminary case study shows how the security of any company can be surreptitiously compromised by covertly gathering the open source personal data of the companyâs employees and exploiting these in a cyber attack. Our method uses tools that can search, drill down and visualise open source intelligence structurally. It then exploits these data to organise creative spear phishing attacks on the unsuspecting victims who unknowingly activate the malware necessary to compromise the companyâs computer systems. The entire process is the covert and virtual equivalent of overtly stealing someoneâs password âover the shoulderâ. A more sophisticated development of this case study will provide a seamless sequence of interoperable computing processes from the initial gathering of employee names to the successful penetration of security measures
International Humanitarian and Development Aid and Big Data Governance
Modern technology and innovations constantly transform the world. This also applies to humanitarian action and development aid, for example: humanitarian drones, crowd sourcing of information, or the utility of Big Data in crisis analytics and humanitarian intelligence. The acceleration of modernization in these adjacent fields can in part be attributed to new partnerships between aid agencies and new private stakeholders that increasingly become active, such as individual crisis mappers, mobile telecommunication companies, or technological SMEs. These partnerships, however, must be described as simultaneously beneficial as well as problematic. Many private actors do not subscribe to the humanitarian principles (humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality), which govern UN and NGO operations, or are not even aware of them. Their interests are not solely humanitarian, but may include entrepreneurial agendas. The unregulated use of data in humanitarian intelligence has already caused negative consequences such as the exposure of sensitive data about aid agencies and of victims of disasters. This chapter investigates the emergent governance trends around data innovation in the humanitarian and development field. It takes a look at the ways in which the field tries to regulate itself and the utility of the humanitarian principles for Big Data analytics and data-driven innovation. It will argue that it is crucially necessary to formulate principles for data governance in the humanitarian context in order to ensure the safeguarding of beneficiaries that are particularly vulnerable. In order to do that, the chapter proposes to reinterpret the humanitarian principles to accommodate the new reality of datafication of different aspects of society
Problematising upstream technology through speculative design: the case of quantified cats and dogs
There is growing interest in technology that quantifies aspects of our lives. This paper draws on critical practice and speculative design to explore, question and problematise the ultimate consequences of such technology using the quantification of companion animals (pets) as a case study. We apply the concept of âmoving upstreamâ to study such technology and use a qualitative research approach in which both pet owners, and animal behavioural experts, were presented with, and asked to discuss, speculative designs for pet quantification applications, the design of which were extrapolated from contemporary trends. Our findings indicate a strong desire among pet owners for technology that has little scientific justification, whilst our experts caution that the use of technology to augment human-animal communication has the potential to disimprove animal welfare, undermine human-animal bonds, and create human-human conflicts. Our discussion informs wider debates regarding quantification technology
Analyzing the Evolution of Inter-package Dependencies in Operating Systems: A Case Study of Ubuntu
An Operating System (OS) combines multiple interdependent software packages,
which usually have their own independently developed architectures. When a
multitude of independent packages are placed together in an OS, an implicit
inter-package architecture is formed. For an evolutionary effort,
designers/developers of OS can greatly benefit from fully understanding the
system-wide dependency focused on individual files, specifically executable
files, and dynamically loadable libraries. We propose a framework, DepEx, aimed
at discovering the detailed package relations at the level of individual binary
files and their associated evolutionary changes. We demonstrate the utility of
DepEx by systematically investigating the evolution of a large-scale Open
Source OS, Ubuntu. DepEx enabled us to systematically acquire and analyze the
dependencies in different versions of Ubuntu released between 2005 (5.04) to
2023 (23.04). Our analysis revealed various evolutionary trends in package
management and their implications based on the analysis of the 84 consecutive
versions available for download (these include beta versions). This study has
enabled us to assert that DepEx can provide researchers and practitioners with
a better understanding of the implicit software dependencies in order to
improve the stability, performance, and functionality of their software as well
as to reduce the risk of issues arising during maintenance, updating, or
migration.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in the 17th international
conference on Software Architectur
- âŠ