Gamification techniques for raising cyber security awareness

Due to the prevalence of online services in modern society, such as internet banking and social media, it is important for users to have an understanding of basic security measures in order to keep themselves safe online. However, users often do not know how to make their online interactions secure, which demonstrates an educational need in this area. Gamification has grown in popularity in recent years and has been used to teach people about a range of subjects. This paper presents an exploratory study investigating the use of gamification techniques to educate average users about password security, with the aim of raising overall security awareness. To explore the impact of such techniques, a role-playing quiz application (RPG) was developed for the Android platform to educate users about password security. Results gained from the work highlightedthat users enjoyed learning via the use of the password application, and felt they benefitted from the inclusion of gamification techniques. Future work seeks to expand the prototype into a full solution, covering a range of security awareness issues

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

A survey for variable young stars with small telescopes: II - mapping a protoplanetary disc with stable structures at 0.15 au

The HOYS citizen science project conducts long term, multifilter, high cadence monitoring of large YSO samples with a wide variety of professional and amateur telescopes. We present the analysis of the light curve of V1490 Cyg in the Pelican Nebula. We show that colour terms in the diverse photometric data can be calibrated out to achieve a median photometric accuracy of 0.02 mag in broadband filters, allowing detailed investigations into a variety of variability amplitudes over timescales from hours to several years. Using Gaia DR2 we estimate the distance to the Pelican Nebula to be 870 +70 −55 pc. V1490 Cyg is a quasi-periodic dipper with a period of 31.447 ± 0.011 d. The obscuring dust has homogeneous properties, and grains larger than those typical in the ISM. Larger variability on short timescales is observed in U and Rc−Hα, with U-amplitudes reaching 3 mag on timescales of hours, indicating the source is accreting. The Hα equivalent width and NIR/MIR colours place V1490 Cyg between CTTS/WTTS and transition disk objects. The material responsible for the dipping is located in a warped inner disk, about 0.15 AU from the star. This mass reservoir can be filled and emptied on time scales shorter than the period at a rate of up to 10−10 M�/yr, consistent with low levels of accretion in other T Tauri stars. Most likely the warp at this separation from the star is induced by a protoplanet in the inner accretion disk. However, we cannot fully rule out the possibility of an AA Tau-like warp, or occultations by the Hill sphere around a forming planet

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the Second Phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since 2014 July. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the 14th from SDSS overall (making this Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes the data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (2014–2016 July) public. Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey; the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data-driven machine-learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from the SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS web site (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020 and will be followed by SDSS-V

A Knowledge Interface System for Information and Cyber Security Using Semantic Wiki

Resilience against information and cyber security threats has become an essential ability for organizations to maintain business continuity. As bulletproof security is an unattainable goal, organizations need to concentrate to select optimal countermeasures against information and cyber security threats. Implementation of cyber risk management actions require special knowledge and resources, which especially small and medium-size enterprises often lack. Information and cyber security risk management establish knowledge intensive business processes, which can be assisted with a proper knowledge management system. This paper analyzes how Semantic MediaWiki could be used as a platform to assist organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, in their information and cyber security risk management. The approach adopts design science research and service design methodologies in the derivation and evaluation of the system.peerReviewe

2018 Class Exercise

Data descriptions made by the Professional Skills 2018 clas