Towards a cyberterrorism life-cycle (CLC) model

Cyberterrorism has emerged as a new threat in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) landscape. The ease of use, affordability, remote capabilities and access to critical targets makes cyberterrorism a potential threat to cause wide-scale damage. Cyberterrorism is often incorrectly perceived as encompassing all cybercrimes. However, cyberterrorism differs from cybercrime in various ways including motivation, attack goals, techniques and effects. Motivations for cyberterrorism, which is similar to terrorism in general, stem from religious, social and political views. Cyberterrorists generally would seek to have high impact in order to gain publicity for their cause, whereas cybercriminals often prefer to have their acts undetected in order to hide their financial theft, fraud or espionage. Therefore, there are various factors that drive the development of a cyberterrorist. This paper proposes a model for the development of cyberterrorism in order to show the various influential forces. The Cyberterrorism Life-Cycle (CLC) model presented in this paper is composed of five phases: Prepare, Acquaint, Choose, Execute, and Deter (PACED). In addition the paper looks at various factors, including social, practices, objectives, targets and countermeasures, which are mapped onto the PACED phases in order to show the interaction and dynamic nature during the life-cycle development

Building an ontology for cyberterrorism

Cyberterrorism and the use of the Internet for cyberterrorism is an emerging field. Often cyberterrorism activities overlap with traditional hacking and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure exploitation. As a result, the defining and differentiating characteristics of cyberterrorism can easily be misunderstood. The use of an ontology specifically developed for cyberterrorism, will provide a common framework to share conceptual models. By using an ontology, the internal and external environment of a field (in this case, cyberterrorism) can be captured together with the relationships between the environments. This paper proposes an ontology to identify whether a cyber event can be classified as a cyberterrorist attack or a support activity. The role of the cyberterrorism ontological model will be to provide a better structure and depiction of relationships, interactions and influencing factors by capturing the content and boundaries in the field of cyberterrorism

Collaboration Towards a More Inclusive Society: The Case of South African ICT4D Researchers

In this study, research collaboration in the context of South African Information and Communication for Development (ICT4D) researchers was investigated using a mixed methods approach. South Africa, a country with stark development challenges and on the other hand a well-established ICT infrastructure, provides an appropriate context for ICT4D research. Firstly, a quantitative analysis of South African research collaboration between 2003 and 2016 was conducted to determine the existing research collaboration patterns of South African ICT4D researchers. This is based on the publications in three top ICT4D journals namely the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC), Information Technologies & International Development (ITID), and Information Technology for Development (ITD). The results show that most co-authored papers were intra-institutional collaborations, with limited inter-institutional collaboration between South African authors or between South African and other African authors. Secondly, interviews were conducted with South African researchers who emerged as inter- and intra-institutional collaborators to gain insight into the technology, drivers and barriers affecting South African research collaboration. We report our findings and discuss the implications for employing research collaboration as a mechanism for addressing inequality and supporting inclusion.School of Computin

Information security: Listening to the perspective of organisational insiders

Aligned with the strategy-as-practice research tradition, this article investigates how organisational insiders understand and perceive their surrounding information security practices, how they interpret them, and how they turn such interpretations into strategic actions. The study takes a qualitative case study approach, and participants are employees at the Research & Development department of a multinational original brand manufacturer. The article makes an important contribution to organisational information security management. It addresses the behaviour of organisational insiders – a group whose role in the prevention, response and mitigation of information security incidents is critical. The article identifies a set of organisational insiders’ perceived components of effective information security practices (organisational mission statement; common understanding of information security; awareness of threats; knowledge of information security incidents, routines and policy; relationships between employees; circulation of stories; role of punishment provisions; and training), based on which more successful information security strategies can be developed

A framework for designing cloud forensic‑enabled services (CFeS)

Cloud computing is used by consumers to access cloud services. Malicious actors exploit vulnerabilities of cloud services to attack consumers. The link between these two assumptions is the cloud service. Although cloud forensics assists in the direction of investigating and solving cloud-based cyber-crimes, in many cases the design and implementation of cloud services falls back. Software designers and engineers should focus their attention on the design and implementation of cloud services that can be investigated in a forensic sound manner. This paper presents a methodology that aims on assisting designers to design cloud forensic-enabled services. The methodology supports the design of cloud services by implementing a number of steps to make the services cloud forensic-enabled. It consists of a set of cloud forensic constraints, a modelling language expressed through a conceptual model and a process based on the concepts identified and presented in the model. The main advantage of the proposed methodology is the correlation of cloud services’ characteristics with the cloud investigation while providing software engineers the ability to design and implement cloud forensic-enabled services via the use of a set of predefined forensic related task

Sex and sexuality: An evolutionary view

In this article, I first offer a summary of Darwin’s main ideas, especially relating to sex, and explain how these have been elaborated by more recent evolutionary scholars. I then give an account of the historical divergence between psychoanalysis and classical Darwinian thought, and describe how the early psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein tried to counter this by addressing some biological themes in her work. Following a review of some contemporary attempts to bring psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought into alignment with each other, I make some suggestions regarding a view of sex and sexuality that would be sound in evolutionary terms while also being helpful in psychoanalytic ones

A model for polyelectrolytes

Journal of Statistical Physics1001-2267-27