Pest and disease incidence of coniferous species in Taman Saujana Hijau, Putrajaya urban park, Malaysia

Taman Saujana Hijau (TSH), Putrajaya is a 41-ha urban park planted with various coniferous species from around the world. Insect pests and disease incidences of this park are unknown and there is a need for an evaluation of the health status of this urban park. This study assessed the level of pest and disease incidents of coniferous species in 12 plots of 7 species (Araucaria bidwilii, Araucaria haterophylla, Araucaria cunninghamii, Pinus caribaea, Pinus merkusii, Podocarpus polystachyus, and Podocarpus costalis). Termites, canker disease, and foliar disease are three major problems. The highest pest and disease incidence (PnDI) was foliar disease with a 0.49 coefficient correlation between the total number of trees and the PnDI, followed by canker disease with 0.40, and termites with 0.36. Of the seven conifers, A. haterophylla was the most infected followed by A. bidwilii and A.cunninghamii. It was concluded that the incidence of pests and diseases in TSH was moderate. To our knowledge, this may be the first baseline inventory of pests and diseases of coniferous species in Malaysia

A model for describing and maximising Security Knowledge Sharing to enhance security awareness

Employees play a crucial role in enhancing information security in the workplace, and this requires everyone having the requisite security knowledge and know-how. To maximise knowledge levels, organisations should encourage and facilitate Security Knowledge Sharing (SKS) between employees. To maximise sharing, we need first to understand the mechanisms whereby such sharing takes place and then to encourage and engender such sharing. A study was carried out to test the applicability of Transactive Memory Systems Theory in describing knowledge sharing in this context, which confirmed its applicability in this domain. To encourage security knowledge sharing, the harnessing of Self-Determination Theory was proposed— satisfying employee autonomy, relatedness and competence needs to maximise sharing. Such sharing is required to improve and enhance employee security awareness across organisations. We propose a model to describe the mechanisms for such sharing as well as the means by which it can be encouraged

Alerting Users About Phishing Attacks

Cyber attacks are emerging as problems caused not only by tech- nological aspects but also by human factors neglected when designing inter- active systems. In this paper, we show how one of the most popular attacks on the Web, phishing, is very much related to UI aspects and how a wrong UI design determines a greater vulnerability of users. We performed a heuristic evaluation to assess the most recent applications such as browsers and mail clients that adopt warning messages as prevention of phishing attacks. The results highlighted that different aspects of UI should be better designed to limit phishing attacks. In addition, as a prevention of cyber attacks, we described an ongoing work of a questionnaire that aims to make users aware of the risks of cyber attacks