Social Networking: A Boon to Criminals

With the world getting more and more digitized, social networking has also found a place in the cyber world. These social networking sites (SNSs) which enable people to socialize, and build and maintain relationships are attracting attention of all kinds of people such as teens, adults, sports persons, and even businesses. But these SNSs are also getting unwanted attention from people like sexual predators, spammers, and people involved in criminal and illegal activities. This paper talks about SNSs and how these sites are exploited for criminal or illegal activity. The SNSs are discussed in detail with respect to user profiles, user networks, and privacy and security with respect to these user accounts. The paper also talks about the way available data on these SNSs can be exploited. The paper concludes with a few real life recent criminal cases associated with these SNSs. Keywords: social networking, social networking sites, Facebook, MySpace, online predators, phishing, social networking crime, social networking model

A Review-Botnet Detection and Suppression in Clouds

Internet security problems remain a major challenge with many security concerns such as Internet worms, spam, and phishing attacks. Botnets is well-organized distributed network attacks, consist of a large number of bots that generate huge volumes of spam or launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on victim hosts. Botnet attacks degrade the status of Internet security. Clouds provide botmaster with an ideal environment of rich computing resources where it can easily deploy or remove C&C server and perform attacks.  It is of vital importance for cloud service providers to detect botnet,  prevent attack,  and trace back to the botmaster.  It also becomes necessary to detect and suppress these bots to protect the clouds. This paper provides the various botnet detection techniques and the comparison of various botnet detection techniques. It also provides the botnet suppression technique in cloud. Keywords: Cloud computing, network security, botnet, botmmaster, botnet detection, botnet suppressio

EXTRACTION, BIOACTIVITIES, PHYTOCHEMICAL INVESTIGATION AND IN-VIVO TOXICITY STUDIES OF MESUA FERREA L. STAMENS

Objective: To investigate in-vitro antibacterial and free radical scavenging potentials of Mesua ferrea L. stamens which are used in traditional medicinal preparations along with their phytochemical investigation and in-vivo toxicity studiesMethods: Various extracts of M. ferrea stamens were prepared by kinetic maceration method using four organic solvents. Potent antibacterial n-hexane extract of stamens was selected in the preliminary screening for antibacterial activity which was performed by an agar diffusion method for further studies. Quantification of antibacterial activity of n-hexane extract was carried out using broth microdilution method as per CLSI guidelines. Phytochemical investigations of the same extract were performed using qualitative tests for the detection of various phytochemical groups and Libermann-Burchard colorimetric assay for determination of total terpenoid content. In-vivo safety of the extract was determined by acute oral toxicity studies in mice as per OECD guidelines test no.420.Results: n-hexane extract of M. ferrea stamens was found most potent amongst other extracts studied for antibacterial activity; moreover it exhibited bactericidal activity against selected bacterial pathogens. The same extract exhibited good free radical scavenging activity in DPPH assay (IC50 value = 66.3 µg/ml). Phytochemical investigation of extract revealed presence of sterols, terpenoids and volatile oil components and the total terpenoid content was estimated as 102.8 mg/ml of dried extract (in terms of lupeol equivalents). The extract was found safe in mice in acute oral toxicity studies.Conclusion: M. ferrea stamens exhibited broad spectrum antibacterial activity along with good free radical scavenging potential and in-vivo safety which encourage further studies in the area.Â

SOFrWARE COMPLEXITY AND MAINTAINABILITY

This paper examines the relationships between software complexity and software maintainability in commercial software environments. Models are proposed for estimating the economic impacts of software complexity and for identifying the factors which affect a system\u27s complexity. Empirical work currently under way has shown these models to be implementable

Effectiveness factors in bidispersed catalysts under conditions of catalyst fouling

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Awareness of Scam E-mails: An Exploratory Research Study

The goal of this research was to find the factors that influence a user’s ability to identify e-mail scams. It also aimed to understand user’s awareness regarding e-mail scams and actions that need to be taken if and when victimized. This study was conducted on a university campus with 163 participants. This study presented the participants with two scam e-mails and two legitimate e-mails and asked the participants to correctly identify these e-mails as scam or legitimate. The study focused on the ability of people to differentiate between scam and legitimate e-mails. The study attempted to determine factors that influence a user’s ability to successfully identify e-mail scams. The results indicated that frequency of e-mail usage was the only factor that influences e-mail scam detection. Only 1.7% of the respondents were able to identify all four e-mails correctly and 64.5% of the respondents were correctly able to identify three of the given four e-mails. Most users tended to delete/ignore the e-mail after receiving a scam e-mail. 59.3% respondents indicated that they were able to identify scam e-mail. Users also tended to trust reputed company names when trying to discern whether the particular e-mail was a scam or was legitimate. It should be noted that this paper is based on a subset of the entire dataset collected. Keywords: E-mail scam, phishing, e-mail scam identification, awareness of e-mail scam, indicators used in detecting e-mails, phishing attacks, context-aware phishin

Direct observation of 4+ to 2+ gamma transition in 8Be

The low lying states in $^8$Be are believed to have a two-alpha cluster structure and hence a large intrinsic quadrupole deformation. An earlier calculation showed a large collective enhancement in gamma transition probability between the low lying states leading to a 4$^+$ to 2$^+$ gamma branch of $\sim10^{-7}$ and a resonant radiative cross section of 134 nb for the $\alpha+\alpha$ entrance channel. We report here the first experimental evidence for this transition through a $\gamma-\alpha-\alpha$ coincidence measurement in the reaction $^4$He($\alpha,\alpha \gamma$)$^4$He using a gas target. The measured cross sections on and off the 4$^+$ resonance are 165 $\pm$ 41 (stat) $\pm$35 (sys) nb and 39 $\pm$ 25 (stat) $\pm$7 (sys) nb, respectively.Comment: Total 4 pages, 4 figures, in RevTeX format, submitted to PR