1,434 research outputs found

    Between Hype and Understatement: Reassessing Cyber Risks as a Security Strategy

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    Most of the actions that fall under the trilogy of cyber crime, terrorism,and war exploit pre-existing weaknesses in the underlying technology.Because these vulnerabilities that exist in the network are not themselvesillegal, they tend to be overlooked in the debate on cyber security. A UKreport on the cost of cyber crime illustrates this approach. Its authors chose to exclude from their analysis the costs in anticipation of cyber crime, such as insurance costs and the costs of purchasing anti-virus software on the basis that "these are likely to be factored into normal day-to-day expenditures for the Government, businesses, and individuals. This article contends if these costs had been quantified and integrated into the cost of cyber crime, then the analysis would have revealed that what matters is not so much cyber crime, but the fertile terrain of vulnerabilities that unleash a range of possibilities to whomever wishes to exploit them. By downplaying the vulnerabilities, the threats represented by cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cyber crime are conversely inflated. Therefore, reassessing risk as a strategy for security in cyberspace must include acknowledgment of understated vulnerabilities, as well as a better distributed knowledge about the nature and character of the overhyped threats of cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and cyber war

    Using Unsupervised Machine Learning to Detect Peer-to-Peer Botnet Flows

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    The war against botnet infection is fought every day by users that want to feel safe against any threat of compromise hosts. In this paper we are going to focus on the behavior of Peer 2 Peer (P2P) botnets, which along with hybrid botnets is a growing trend among attackers. The main approach will consist of a behavior comparison among features extracted from network flows, focusing only in the flows from P2P applications including P2P botnets

    Cyber Warfare and the Crime of Aggression: The Need for Individual Accountability on Tomorrow’s Battlefield

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    As cyberspace matures, the international system faces a new challenge in confronting the use of force. Non-State actors continue to grow in importance, gaining the skill and the expertise necessary to wage asymmetric warfare using non-traditional weaponry that can create devastating real-world consequences. The international legal system must adapt to this battleground and provide workable mechanisms to hold aggressive actors accountable for their actions. The International Criminal Court--the only criminal tribunal in the world with global reach--holds significant promise in addressing this threat. The Assembly of State Parties should construct the definition of aggression to include these emerging challenges. By structuring the definition to confront the challenges of cyberspace--specifically non-State actors, the disaggregation of warfare, and new conceptions of territoriality--the International Criminal Court can become a viable framework of accountability for the wars of the twenty-first century

    Reaction to New Security Threat Class

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    Each new identified security threat class triggers new research and development efforts by the scientific and professional communities. In this study, we investigate the rate at which the scientific and professional communities react to new identified threat classes as it is reflected in the number of patents, scientific articles and professional publications over a long period of time. The following threat classes were studied: Phishing; SQL Injection; BotNet; Distributed Denial of Service; and Advanced Persistent Threat. Our findings suggest that in most cases it takes a year for the scientific community and more than two years for industry to react to a new threat class with patents. Since new products follow patents, it is reasonable to expect that there will be a window of approximately two to three years in which no effective product is available to cope with the new threat class

    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

    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
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