The Computer Misuse Act 1990: lessons from its past and predictions for its future

The age of the internet has thrown down some real challenges to the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Recently, the Government made changes to this piece of legislation, in an attempt to meet two of those challenges--the proliferation of “ Denial of Service” (DoS) attacks, and the creation and dissemination of “ Hackers' tools” --and to fulfil international commitments on cybercrime. Yet some of these new measures invite criticisms of policy, form and content, and bring doubts about how easy to interpret, and how enforceable, they will be

Sony, Cyber Security, and Free Speech: Preserving the First Amendment in the Modern World

Reprinted from 16 U.C. Davis Bus. L.J. 309 (2016). This paper explores the Sony hack in 2014 allegedly launched by the North Korean government in retaliation over Sony’s production of The Interview and considers the hack’s chilling impact on speech in technology. One of the most devastating cyber attacks in history, the hack exposed approximately thirty- eight million files of sensitive data, including over 170,000 employee emails, thousands of employee social security numbers and unreleased footage of upcoming movies. The hack caused Sony to censor the film and prompted members of the entertainment industry at large to tailor their communication and conform storylines to societal standards. Such censorship cuts the First Amendment at its core and exemplifies the danger cyber terror poses to freedom of speech by compromising Americans’ privacy in digital mediums. This paper critiques the current methods for combatting cyber terror, which consist of unwieldy federal criminal laws and controversial information sharing policies, while proposing more promising solutions that unleash the competitive power of the free market with limited government regulation. It also recommends legal, affordable and user-friendly tools anyone can use to secure their technology, recapture their privacy and exercise their freedom of speech online without fear of surreptitious surveillance or retaliatory exposure

Pervasive eHealth services a security and privacy risk awareness survey

The human factor is often recognised as a major aspect of cyber-security research. Risk and situational perception are identified as key factors in the decision making process, often playing a lead role in the adoption of security mechanisms. However, risk awareness and perception have been poorly investigated in the field of eHealth wearables. Whilst end-users often have limited understanding of privacy and security of wearables, assessing the perceived risks and consequences will help shape the usability of future security mechanisms. This paper present a survey of the the risks and situational awareness in eHealth services. An analysis of the lack of security and privacy measures in connected health devices is described with recommendations to circumvent critical situations

REST: A Thread Embedding Approach for Identifying and Classifying User-specified Information in Security Forums

How can we extract useful information from a security forum? We focus on identifying threads of interest to a security professional: (a) alerts of worrisome events, such as attacks, (b) offering of malicious services and products, (c) hacking information to perform malicious acts, and (d) useful security-related experiences. The analysis of security forums is in its infancy despite several promising recent works. Novel approaches are needed to address the challenges in this domain: (a) the difficulty in specifying the "topics" of interest efficiently, and (b) the unstructured and informal nature of the text. We propose, REST, a systematic methodology to: (a) identify threads of interest based on a, possibly incomplete, bag of words, and (b) classify them into one of the four classes above. The key novelty of the work is a multi-step weighted embedding approach: we project words, threads and classes in appropriate embedding spaces and establish relevance and similarity there. We evaluate our method with real data from three security forums with a total of 164k posts and 21K threads. First, REST robustness to initial keyword selection can extend the user-provided keyword set and thus, it can recover from missing keywords. Second, REST categorizes the threads into the classes of interest with superior accuracy compared to five other methods: REST exhibits an accuracy between 63.3-76.9%. We see our approach as a first step for harnessing the wealth of information of online forums in a user-friendly way, since the user can loosely specify her keywords of interest