2,035 research outputs found

    The Exploitation of Web Navigation Data: Ethical Issues and Alternative Scenarios

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    Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes unconsciously his private information to an unknown third party entity, to a company that is unable to control its information to the outside world. As a result, users have lost control over their private data in the Internet. In this paper, we present the entities involved in users' data collection and usage. Then, we highlight what are the ethical issues that arise for users, companies, scientists and governments. Finally, we present some alternative scenarios and suggestions for the entities to address such ethical issues.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

    Command & Control: Understanding, Denying and Detecting - A review of malware C2 techniques, detection and defences

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    In this survey, we first briefly review the current state of cyber attacks, highlighting significant recent changes in how and why such attacks are performed. We then investigate the mechanics of malware command and control (C2) establishment: we provide a comprehensive review of the techniques used by attackers to set up such a channel and to hide its presence from the attacked parties and the security tools they use. We then switch to the defensive side of the problem, and review approaches that have been proposed for the detection and disruption of C2 channels. We also map such techniques to widely-adopted security controls, emphasizing gaps or limitations (and success stories) in current best practices.Comment: Work commissioned by CPNI, available at c2report.org. 38 pages. Listing abstract compressed from version appearing in repor

    Addressing the new generation of spam (Spam 2.0) through Web usage models

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    New Internet collaborative media introduce new ways of communicating that are not immune to abuse. A fake eye-catching profile in social networking websites, a promotional review, a response to a thread in online forums with unsolicited content or a manipulated Wiki page, are examples of new the generation of spam on the web, referred to as Web 2.0 Spam or Spam 2.0. Spam 2.0 is defined as the propagation of unsolicited, anonymous, mass content to infiltrate legitimate Web 2.0 applications.The current literature does not address Spam 2.0 in depth and the outcome of efforts to date are inadequate. The aim of this research is to formalise a definition for Spam 2.0 and provide Spam 2.0 filtering solutions. Early-detection, extendibility, robustness and adaptability are key factors in the design of the proposed method.This dissertation provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art web spam and Spam 2.0 filtering methods to highlight the unresolved issues and open problems, while at the same time effectively capturing the knowledge in the domain of spam filtering.This dissertation proposes three solutions in the area of Spam 2.0 filtering including: (1) characterising and profiling Spam 2.0, (2) Early-Detection based Spam 2.0 Filtering (EDSF) approach, and (3) On-the-Fly Spam 2.0 Filtering (OFSF) approach. All the proposed solutions are tested against real-world datasets and their performance is compared with that of existing Spam 2.0 filtering methods.This work has coined the term ‘Spam 2.0’, provided insight into the nature of Spam 2.0, and proposed filtering mechanisms to address this new and rapidly evolving problem

    Measuring and Disrupting Malware Distribution Networks: An Interdisciplinary Approach

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    Malware Delivery Networks (MDNs) are networks of webpages, servers, computers, and computer files that are used by cybercriminals to proliferate malicious software (or malware) onto victim machines. The business of malware delivery is a complex and multifaceted one that has become increasingly profitable over the last few years. Due to the ongoing arms race between cybercriminals and the security community, cybercriminals are constantly evolving and streamlining their techniques to beat security countermeasures and avoid disruption to their operations, such as by security researchers infiltrating their botnet operations, or law enforcement taking down their infrastructures and arresting those involved. So far, the research community has conducted insightful but isolated studies into the different facets of malicious file distribution. Hence, only a limited picture of the malicious file delivery ecosystem has been provided thus far, leaving many questions unanswered. Using a data-driven and interdisciplinary approach, the purpose of this research is twofold. One, to study and measure the malicious file delivery ecosystem, bringing prior research into context, and to understand precisely how these malware operations respond to security and law enforcement intervention. And two, taking into account the overlapping research efforts of the information security and crime science communities towards preventing cybercrime, this research aims to identify mitigation strategies and intervention points to disrupt this criminal economy more effectively

    Emerging Phishing Trends and Effectiveness of the Anti-Phishing Landing Page

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    Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to share their personal, financial information. Phishing costs Internet users billions of dollars every year. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors, government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April 30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We observed that phishers are exploiting ICANN accredited registrars to launch their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims in 2008 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs

    CALD : surviving various application-layer DDoS attacks that mimic flash crowd

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    Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a continuous critical threat to the Internet. Derived from the low layers, new application-layer-based DDoS attacks utilizing legitimate HTTP requests to overwhelm victim resources are more undetectable. The case may be more serious when suchattacks mimic or occur during the flash crowd event of a popular Website. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of CALD, an architectural extension to protect Web servers against various DDoS attacks that masquerade as flash crowds. CALD provides real-time detection using mess tests but is different from other systems that use resembling methods. First, CALD uses a front-end sensor to monitor thetraffic that may contain various DDoS attacks or flash crowds. Intense pulse in the traffic means possible existence of anomalies because this is the basic property of DDoS attacks and flash crowds. Once abnormal traffic is identified, the sensor sends ATTENTION signal to activate the attack detection module. Second, CALD dynamically records the average frequency of each source IP and check the total mess extent. Theoretically, the mess extent of DDoS attacks is larger than the one of flash crowds. Thus, with some parameters from the attack detection module, the filter is capable of letting the legitimate requests through but the attack traffic stopped. Third, CALD may divide the security modules away from the Web servers. As a result, it keeps maximum performance on the kernel web services, regardless of the harassment from DDoS. In the experiments, the records from www.sina.com and www.taobao.com have proved the value of CALD

    Adversarial behaviours knowledge area

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    The technological advancements witnessed by our society in recent decades have brought improvements in our quality of life, but they have also created a number of opportunities for attackers to cause harm. Before the Internet revolution, most crime and malicious activity generally required a victim and a perpetrator to come into physical contact, and this limited the reach that malicious parties had. Technology has removed the need for physical contact to perform many types of crime, and now attackers can reach victims anywhere in the world, as long as they are connected to the Internet. This has revolutionised the characteristics of crime and warfare, allowing operations that would not have been possible before. In this document, we provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. We first provide a taxonomy of malicious activities based on the attacker’s motivations and capabilities, and then move on to the technological and human elements that adversaries require to run a successful operation. We then discuss a number of frameworks that have been proposed to model malicious operations. Since adversarial behaviours are not a purely technical topic, we draw from research in a number of fields (computer science, criminology, war studies). While doing this, we discuss how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.Published versio
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