17,913 research outputs found
Towards Adversarial Malware Detection: Lessons Learned from PDF-based Attacks
Malware still constitutes a major threat in the cybersecurity landscape, also
due to the widespread use of infection vectors such as documents. These
infection vectors hide embedded malicious code to the victim users,
facilitating the use of social engineering techniques to infect their machines.
Research showed that machine-learning algorithms provide effective detection
mechanisms against such threats, but the existence of an arms race in
adversarial settings has recently challenged such systems. In this work, we
focus on malware embedded in PDF files as a representative case of such an arms
race. We start by providing a comprehensive taxonomy of the different
approaches used to generate PDF malware, and of the corresponding
learning-based detection systems. We then categorize threats specifically
targeted against learning-based PDF malware detectors, using a well-established
framework in the field of adversarial machine learning. This framework allows
us to categorize known vulnerabilities of learning-based PDF malware detectors
and to identify novel attacks that may threaten such systems, along with the
potential defense mechanisms that can mitigate the impact of such threats. We
conclude the paper by discussing how such findings highlight promising research
directions towards tackling the more general challenge of designing robust
malware detectors in adversarial settings
Learning Domain-Specific Word Embeddings from Sparse Cybersecurity Texts
Word embedding is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique that
automatically maps words from a vocabulary to vectors of real numbers in an
embedding space. It has been widely used in recent years to boost the
performance of a vari-ety of NLP tasks such as Named Entity Recognition,
Syntac-tic Parsing and Sentiment Analysis. Classic word embedding methods such
as Word2Vec and GloVe work well when they are given a large text corpus. When
the input texts are sparse as in many specialized domains (e.g.,
cybersecurity), these methods often fail to produce high-quality vectors. In
this pa-per, we describe a novel method to train domain-specificword embeddings
from sparse texts. In addition to domain texts, our method also leverages
diverse types of domain knowledge such as domain vocabulary and semantic
relations. Specifi-cally, we first propose a general framework to encode
diverse types of domain knowledge as text annotations. Then we de-velop a novel
Word Annotation Embedding (WAE) algorithm to incorporate diverse types of text
annotations in word em-bedding. We have evaluated our method on two
cybersecurity text corpora: a malware description corpus and a Common
Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) corpus. Our evaluation re-sults have
demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in learning domain-specific word
embeddings
eBank UK: linking research data, scholarly communication and learning
This paper includes an overview of the changing landscape of scholarly communication and describes outcomes from the innovative eBank UK project, which seeks to build links from e-research through to e-learning. As introduction, the scholarly knowledge cycle is described and the role of digital repositories and aggregator services in linking data-sets from Grid-enabled projects to e-prints through to peer-reviewed articles as resources in portals and Learning Management Systems, are assessed. The development outcomes from the eBank UK project are presented including the distributed information architecture, requirements for common ontologies, data models, metadata schema, open linking technologies, provenance and workflows. Some emerging challenges for the future are presented in conclusion
Data Sets: Word Embeddings Learned from Tweets and General Data
A word embedding is a low-dimensional, dense and real- valued vector
representation of a word. Word embeddings have been used in many NLP tasks.
They are usually gener- ated from a large text corpus. The embedding of a word
cap- tures both its syntactic and semantic aspects. Tweets are short, noisy and
have unique lexical and semantic features that are different from other types
of text. Therefore, it is necessary to have word embeddings learned
specifically from tweets. In this paper, we present ten word embedding data
sets. In addition to the data sets learned from just tweet data, we also built
embedding sets from the general data and the combination of tweets with the
general data. The general data consist of news articles, Wikipedia data and
other web data. These ten embedding models were learned from about 400 million
tweets and 7 billion words from the general text. In this paper, we also
present two experiments demonstrating how to use the data sets in some NLP
tasks, such as tweet sentiment analysis and tweet topic classification tasks
BlogForever D2.4: Weblog spider prototype and associated methodology
The purpose of this document is to present the evaluation of different solutions for capturing blogs, established methodology and to describe the developed blog spider prototype
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