Controlled Data Sharing for Collaborative Predictive Blacklisting

Although sharing data across organizations is often advocated as a promising way to enhance cybersecurity, collaborative initiatives are rarely put into practice owing to confidentiality, trust, and liability challenges. In this paper, we investigate whether collaborative threat mitigation can be realized via a controlled data sharing approach, whereby organizations make informed decisions as to whether or not, and how much, to share. Using appropriate cryptographic tools, entities can estimate the benefits of collaboration and agree on what to share in a privacy-preserving way, without having to disclose their datasets. We focus on collaborative predictive blacklisting, i.e., forecasting attack sources based on one's logs and those contributed by other organizations. We study the impact of different sharing strategies by experimenting on a real-world dataset of two billion suspicious IP addresses collected from Dshield over two months. We find that controlled data sharing yields up to 105% accuracy improvement on average, while also reducing the false positive rate.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears in DIMVA 2015. This is the full version. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1403.212

Approaching Skyscape Archaeology: A Note on Method and Fieldwork for the Case Study of Pompeii

The urban layout of Pompeii presents several orientations, possibly due to an uneven bare ground plateau. However, its main east-west axes have the same orientation of Herculaneum ones, suggesting that not only geomorphological constrains acted as topographical factors. Starting from a hypothesis by Nissen (1906), the method of skyscape archaeology was applied to Pompeii urban grid and temples, testing digital models with fieldwork measurements. The results show that the main east-west axes aligned with the rising summer solstice sun above the local horizon. Furthermore, the Doric Temple was oriented with the sunset on the same time of the year, suggesting an intentional design

Non-Financial Resources to Enhance Companies’ Profitability: A Stakeholder Perspective

Purpose This study aims to investigate the impact of stakeholders’ nonfinancial resources (NFRs) on companies’ profitability, filling a significant gap in the literature regarding the role of NFRs in value creation. Design/methodology/approach Data from 76 organizations from 2017 to 2019 were collected and analyzed. Four primary NFRs and their key value drivers were identified, representing core elements that support different dimensions of a company’s performance. Statistical tests examined the relationship between stakeholders’ NFRs and financial performance measures. Findings When analyzed collectively and individually, the results reveal a significant positive influence of stakeholders’ NFRs on a firm’s profitability. Higher importance assigned to NFRs correlates with a higher return on sales. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature by empirically bridging the gap between stakeholder theory and the resource-based view, addressing the intersection of these perspectives. It also provides novel insights into how stakeholders’ NFRs impact profitability, offering valuable implications for research and managerial practice. It suggests that managers should integrate nonfinancial measures of NFRs within their performance measurement system to manage better and sustain companies’ value-creation process

Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case

Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW) implementations rely on federation policies. Administrators use these policies to create rules that ban or modify content that matches specific rules. This, however, can have unintended consequences for many users. In this paper, we present the first study of federation policies on the DW, their in-the-wild usage, and their impact on users. We identify how these policies may negatively impact "innocent" users and outline possible solutions to avoid this problem in the future

Detecting cyberbullying and cyberaggression in social media

Cyberbullying and cyberaggression are increasingly worrisome phenomena affecting people across all demographics. More than half of young social media users worldwide have been exposed to such prolonged and/or coordinated digital harassment. Victims can experience a wide range of emotions, with negative consequences such as embarrassment, depression, isolation from other community members, which embed the risk to lead to even more critical consequences, such as suicide attempts. In this work, we take the first concrete steps to understand the characteristics of abusive behavior in Twitter, one of today’s largest social media platforms. We analyze 1.2 million users and 2.1 million tweets, comparing users participating in discussions around seemingly normal topics like the NBA, to those more likely to be hate-related, such as the Gamergate controversy, or the gender pay inequality at the BBC station. We also explore specific manifestations of abusive behavior, i.e., cyberbullying and cyberaggression, in one of the hate-related communities (Gamergate). We present a robust methodology to distinguish bullies and aggressors from normal Twitter users by considering text, user, and network-based attributes. Using various state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms, we classify these accounts with over 90% accuracy and AUC. Finally, we discuss the current status of Twitter user accounts marked as abusive by our methodology and study the performance of potential mechanisms that can be used by Twitter to suspend users in the future

Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan's Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effects on the Web

The discussion-board site 4chan has been part of the Internet's dark underbelly since its inception, and recent political events have put it increasingly in the spotlight. In particular, /pol/, the “Politically Incorrect'” board, has been a central figure in the outlandish 2016 US election season, as it has often been linked to the alt-right movement and its rhetoric of hate and racism. However, 4chan remains relatively unstudied by the scientific community: little is known about its user base, the content it generates, and how it affects other parts of the Web. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing /pol/ along several axes, using a dataset of over 8M posts we collected over two and a half months. First, we perform a general characterization, showing that /pol/ users are well distributed around the world and that 4chan's unique features encourage fresh discussions. We also analyze content, finding, for instance, that YouTube links and hate speech are predominant on /pol/. Overall, our analysis not only provides the first measurement study of /pol/, but also insight into online harassment and hate speech trends in social media

Distance-Sensitive Hashing

Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is an important tool for managing high-dimensional noisy or uncertain data, for example in connection with data cleaning (similarity join) and noise-robust search (similarity search). However, for a number of problems the LSH framework is not known to yield good solutions, and instead ad hoc solutions have been designed for particular similarity and distance measures. For example, this is true for output-sensitive similarity search/join, and for indexes supporting annulus queries that aim to report a point close to a certain given distance from the query point. In this paper we initiate the study of distance-sensitive hashing (DSH), a generalization of LSH that seeks a family of hash functions such that the probability of two points having the same hash value is a given function of the distance between them. More precisely, given a distance space $(X, \text{dist})$ and a "collision probability function" (CPF) $f\colon \mathbb{R}\rightarrow [0,1]$ we seek a distribution over pairs of functions $(h,g)$ such that for every pair of points $x, y \in X$ the collision probability is $\Pr[h(x)=g(y)] = f(\text{dist}(x,y))$. Locality-sensitive hashing is the study of how fast a CPF can decrease as the distance grows. For many spaces, $f$ can be made exponentially decreasing even if we restrict attention to the symmetric case where $g=h$. We show that the asymmetry achieved by having a pair of functions makes it possible to achieve CPFs that are, for example, increasing or unimodal, and show how this leads to principled solutions to problems not addressed by the LSH framework. This includes a novel application to privacy-preserving distance estimation. We believe that the DSH framework will find further applications in high-dimensional data management.Comment: Accepted at PODS'18. Abstract shortened due to character limi

Dualsteric activation of M2 muscarinic acetylcholine receptors inhibits cell proliferation in human glioblastoma cell lines

Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) are expressed in several primary and metastatic tumours. ACh synthesized by the tumour cells can modulate cell proliferation by an autocrine mechanism which involves cholinergic receptors. Although a direct or indirect role of transduction pathways activated by cholinergic receptors has not yet been demonstrated, the inhibition of ACh synthesis as well as the release or use of cholinergic antagonists are able to counteract tumour cell growth and slow down the tumour progression in small cell lung carcinoma [1]. In mammary adenocarcinoma and melanoma cell lines, mAChRs can also modulate cell migration and angiogenesis, suggesting their involvement in the metastases formation [2]. The characterization of mAChR effects on more aggressive brain tumours is still poorly investigated. Glioblastomas are the most common brain tumours in humans. Recently, Tata et al. demonstrated that M2 receptor activation inhibits glioma cell growth and survival, suggesting that this receptor subtype may represent a new putative target for glioblastoma therapy [3,4]. Therefore, the identification of more selective ligands for M2 mAChRs may be of clinical significance. Here we report the results on the effects of the muscarinic orthosteric superagonist Iperoxo [5] and its related dualsteric agonists P-6-Iper and N-8-Iper [6]. Our data demonstrate that cell proliferation as well as cell survival of the U251 and U87 stable cell lines were unaffected by treatment with Iperoxo and P-6-Iper. Conversely, N-8-Iper decreased cell proliferation in a time and dose dependent manner. Similarly, N-8-Iper (100 uM) was also able to counteract cell proliferation in glioblastoma cancer stem cells (GB7) obtained from human biopsy. The antiproliferative effect shown by N-8-Iper was significantly counteracted by the selective M2 antagonist methoctramine (10^-7 M), suggesting an actual contribution of the M2 selective activation. References: 1) Song P, Sekhon HS, Jia Y, Keller JA, Blusztajn JK, Mark GP, Spindel ER. Cancer Res. 2003, 63(1), 214-221 2) Boss A, Oppitz M, Lippert G, Drews U. Clin Exp Dermatol. 2005, 30(5), 557-564 3) Ferretti M, Fabbiano C, Di Bari M, Ponti D, Calogero A, Tata AM. Life Sci. 2012, 91(21-22), 1134-1137 4) Ferretti M, Fabbiano C, Di Bari M, Conte C, Castigli E, Sciaccaluga M, Ponti D, Ruggieri P, Raco A, Ricordy R, Calogero A, Tata AM. J Cell Mol Med. 2013, 17(4), 552-566 5) Schrage R, Seemann WK, Kl\uf6ckner J, Dallanoce C, Rack\ue9 K, Kostenis E, De Amici M, Holzgrabe U, Mohr K. Br J Pharmacol. 2013, 169(2), 357-370 6) Matera C, Flammini L, Quadri M, Vivo V, Ballabeni V, Holzgrabe U, Mohr K, De Amici M, Barocelli E, Bertoni S, Dallanoce C. Eur J Med Chem. 2014, 75, 222-23

Histone Acetylation-Mediated Regulation of the Hippo Pathway

The Hippo pathway is a signaling cascade recently found to play a key role in tumorigenesis therefore understanding the mechanisms that regulate it should open new opportunities for cancer treatment. Available data indicate that this pathway is controlled by signals from cell-cell junctions however the potential role of nuclear regulation has not yet been described. Here we set out to verify this possibility and define putative mechanism(s) by which it might occur. By using a luciferase reporter of the Hippo pathway, we measured the effects of different nuclear targeting drugs and found that chromatin-modifying agents, and to a lesser extent certain DNA damaging drugs, strongly induced activity of the reporter. This effect was not mediated by upstream core components (i.e. Mst, Lats) of the Hippo pathway, but through enhanced levels of the Hippo transducer TAZ. Investigation of the underlying mechanism led to the finding that cancer cell exposure to histone deacetylase inhibitors induced secretion of growth factors and cytokines, which in turn activate Akt and inhibit the GSK3 beta associated protein degradation complex in drug-affected as well as in their neighboring cells. Consequently, expression of EMT genes, cell migration and resistance to therapy were induced. These processes were suppressed by using pyrvinium, a recently described small molecule activator of the GSK 3 beta associated degradation complex. Overall, these findings shed light on a previously unrecognized phenomenon by which certain anti-cancer agents may paradoxically promote tumor progression by facilitating stabilization of the Hippo transducer TAZ and inducing cancer cell migration and resistance to therapy. Pharmacological targeting of the GSK3 beta associated degradation complex may thus represent a unique approach to treat cancer. © 2013 Basu et al