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

An Examination of E-Banking Fraud Prevention and Detection in Nigerian Banks

E-banking offers a number of advantages to financial institutions, including convenience in terms of time and money. However, criminal activities in the information age have changed the way banking operations are performed. This has made e-banking an area of interest. The growth of cybercrime – particularly hacking, identity theft, phishing, Trojans, service denial attacks and account takeover– has created several challenges for financial institutions, especially regarding how they protect their assets and prevent their customers from becoming victims of cyber fraud. These criminal activities have remained prevalent due to certain features of cyber, such as the borderless nature of the internet and the continuous growth of the computer networks. Following these identified challenges for financial institutions, this study examines e-banking fraud prevention and detection in the Nigerian banking sector; particularly the current nature, impacts, contributing factors, and prevention and detection mechanisms of e-banking fraud in Nigerian banking institutions. This study adopts mixed research methods with the aid of descriptive and inferential analysis, which comprised exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for the quantitative data analysis, whilst thematic analysis was used for the qualitative data analysis. The theoretical framework was informed by Routine Activity Theory (RAT) and Fraud Management Lifecycle Theory (FMLT). The findings show that the factors contributing to the increase in e-banking fraud in Nigeria include ineffective banking operations, internal control issues, lack of customer awareness and bank staff training and education, inadequate infrastructure, presence of sophisticated technological tools in the hands of fraudsters, negligence of banks’ customers concerning their e-banking account devices, lack of compliance with the banking rules and regulations, and ineffective legal procedure and law enforcement. In addition, the enforcement of rules and regulations in relation to the prosecution of financial fraudsters has been passive in Nigeria. Moreover, the findings also show that the activities of each stage of fraud management lifecycle theory are interdependent and have a collective and considerable influence on combating e-banking fraud. The results of the findings confirm that routine activity theory is a real-world theoretical framework while applied to e-banking fraud. Also, from the analysis of the findings, this research offers a new model for e-banking fraud prevention and detection within the Nigerian banking sector. This new model confirms that to have perfect prevention and detection of e-banking fraud, there must be a presence of technological mechanisms, fraud monitoring, effective internal controls, customer complaints, whistle-blowing, surveillance mechanisms, staff-customer awareness and education, legal and judicial controls, institutional synergy mechanisms of in the banking systems. Finally, the findings from the analyses of this study have some significant implications; not only for academic researchers or scholars and accounting practitioners, but also for policymakers in the financial institutions and anti-fraud agencies in both the private and public sectors

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

WARDOG: Awareness detection watchbog for Botnet infection on the host device

Botnets constitute nowadays one of the most dangerous security threats worldwide. High volumes of infected machines are controlled by a malicious entity and perform coordinated cyber-attacks. The problem will become even worse in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the number of insecure devices is going to be exponentially increased. This paper presents WARDOG – an awareness and digital forensic system that informs the end-user of the botnet’s infection, exposes the botnet infrastructure, and captures verifiable data that can be utilized in a court of law. The responsible authority gathers all information and automatically generates a unitary documentation for the case. The document contains undisputed forensic information, tracking all involved parties and their role in the attack. The deployed security mechanisms and the overall administration setting ensures non-repudiation of performed actions and enforces accountability. The provided properties are verified through theoretic analysis. In simulated environment, the effectiveness of the proposed solution, in mitigating the botnet operations, is also tested against real attack strategies that have been captured by the FORTHcert honeypots, overcoming state-of-the-art solutions. Moreover, a preliminary version is implemented in real computers and IoT devices, highlighting the low computational/communicational overheads of WARDOG in the field

Secure Storage Model for Digital Forensic Readiness

Securing digital evidence is a key factor that contributes to evidence admissibility during digital forensic investigations, particularly in establishing the chain of custody of digital evidence. However, not enough is done to ensure that the environment and access to the evidence are secure. Attackers can go to extreme lengths to cover up their tracks, which is a serious concern to digital forensics – particularly digital forensic readiness. If an attacker gains access to the location where evidence is stored, they could easily alter the evidence (if not remove it altogether). Even though integrity checks can be performed to ensure that the evidence is sound, the collected evidence may contain sensitive information that an attacker can easily use for other forms of attack. To this end, this paper proposes a model for securely storing digital evidence captured pre- and post-incident to achieve reactive forensics. Various components were considered, such as integrity checks, environment sandboxing, strong encryption, two-factor authentication, as well as unique random file naming. A proof-of-concept tool was developed to realize this model and to prove its validity. A series of tests were conducted to check for system security, performance, and requirements validation, Overall, the results obtained showed that, with minimal effort, securing forensic artefacts is a relatively inexpensive and reliable feat. This paper aims to standardize evidence storage, practice high security standards, as well as remove the need to create new systems that achieve the same purpose