Spatiotemporal patterns and predictability of cyberattacks

A relatively unexplored issue in cybersecurity science and engineering is whether there exist intrinsic patterns of cyberattacks. Conventional wisdom favors absence of such patterns due to the overwhelming complexity of the modern cyberspace. Surprisingly, through a detailed analysis of an extensive data set that records the time-dependent frequencies of attacks over a relatively wide range of consecutive IP addresses, we successfully uncover intrinsic spatiotemporal patterns underlying cyberattacks, where the term "spatio" refers to the IP address space. In particular, we focus on analyzing {\em macroscopic} properties of the attack traffic flows and identify two main patterns with distinct spatiotemporal characteristics: deterministic and stochastic. Strikingly, there are very few sets of major attackers committing almost all the attacks, since their attack "fingerprints" and target selection scheme can be unequivocally identified according to the very limited number of unique spatiotemporal characteristics, each of which only exists on a consecutive IP region and differs significantly from the others. We utilize a number of quantitative measures, including the flux-fluctuation law, the Markov state transition probability matrix, and predictability measures, to characterize the attack patterns in a comprehensive manner. A general finding is that the attack patterns possess high degrees of predictability, potentially paving the way to anticipating and, consequently, mitigating or even preventing large-scale cyberattacks using macroscopic approaches

Comparative Study of Students' Motivation in Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language

Purpose: This study aimed to determine whether there was a significant difference in motivation for learning Chinese as a foreign language according to their private Chinese supplementary tutoring status and linguistic Background of Grades 10 and 11 students at a private school in Bangkok, Thailand. Research design, data and methodology: A convenience sample of 280 students were chosen to take the questionnaire of Grade 10 and 11 students at the targeted school during the academic year 2021-2022. For the data collection, the researcher adapted Gardner’s (2004) Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) for motivation for learning Chinese as a foreign language to measure participants scales. Results: The result from the one-way ANOVA test showed that there was a statistically significant difference in motivation for learning Chinese as a foreign language among Grade 10 students according to their linguistic background but none for Grade 11 students at a private school in Bangkok, Thailand. Conclusions: The overall level of the participants’ motivation level for learning Chinese as a foreign language according to their private Chinese supplementary tutoring status and linguistic background was interpreted as slightly high