Proactive Detection of Insider Attacks

Insider attacks are a significant threat to IT infrastructures and are difficult to detect. The problem is exacerbated if the attacker explicitly tries to masquerade as a legitimate user and evade detection. In this paper, we describe a novel approach for detecting these attacks, where the intrusion detection system (IDS) proactively influences the user's perception of the system. The IDS does so by switching among a set of situational contexts and observing the user's reaction to these changes. This is done in a way that poses no significant problem to legitimate users, but creates difficulties for attackers that have learned the system in specific contexts, and therefore cannot improvise well enough to avoid being detected. We present a framework for a generic proactive IDS that shows promising experimental results, suggesting that this method can indeed be effective in detecting masquerade attacks in a variety of domains. We also present an implementation of this idea in a behavioral biometrics domain, where we show that making the IDS proactive enables detection of masquerades

Integrated gene analyses of de novo variants from 46,612 trios with autism and developmental disorders

Most genetic studies consider autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental disorder (DD) separately despite overwhelming comorbidity and shared genetic etiology. Here, we analyzed de novo variants (DNVs) from 15,560 ASD (6,557 from SPARK) and 31,052 DD trios independently and also combined as broader neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) using three models. We identify 615 NDD candidate genes (false discovery rate [FDR] < 0.05) supported by ≥1 models, including 138 reaching Bonferroni exome-wide significance (P < 3.64e-7) in all models. The genes group into five functional networks associating with different brain developmental lineages based on single-cell nuclei transcriptomic data. We find no evidence for ASD-specific genes in contrast to 18 genes significantly enriched for DD. There are 53 genes that show mutational bias, including enrichments for missense (n = 41) or truncating (n = 12) DNVs. We also find 10 genes with evidence of male- or female-bias enrichment, including 4 X chromosome genes with significant female burden (DDX3X, MECP2, WDR45, and HDAC8). This large-scale integrative analysis identifies candidates and functional subsets of NDD genes