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

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Fighting Spam. How Stringent is the Canadian Legal Arsenal. An Analysis in the Light of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act

Following several countries, Canada recently passed Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), in an attempt to tackle spam. The law aims to ‘‘protect Canadians while ensuring that businesses can continue to compete in the global marketplace”. For this purpose, CASL prohibits not only the sending of commercial electronic messages without consent, but also any alteration of transmission data in the course of a commercial activity. Moreover, the Act disallows the installation of a computer program on another person’s computer system and the sending of commercial electronic messages following the installation. These three activities are prohibited unless the author or initiator has obtained the recipient’s prior consent, either express or implied. This opt-in approach contrasts with the U.S. CAN- SPAM Acts opt-out regime, in force since 2004, which is known to offer to senders the chance to initiate contact and to recipients the option to unsubscribe or reject any subsequent commercial electronic message. Our paper intends to demonstrate that, notwithstanding the apparent difference in their respective approach, CASL and U.S. CAN-SPAM Act remain fundamentally similar in practical effect. This resemblance is good news, considering the profile and proximity of Canadian and American e-commerce economies. Thus, in spite of its detail and complexity, CASL may not be the most stringent anti-spam act as claimed, certainly not with the challenges related to its implementation and enforcement