Cyber Crime

Talk given by Gary Kibby from SOCA at the Web Science Industry Week in Dec 2012. Readings and task taken from previous years

Why forums? An empirical analysis into the facilitating factors of carding forums

Over the last decade, the nature of cybercrime has transformed from naive vandalism to profit-driven, leading to the emergence of a global underground economy. A noticeable trend which has surfaced in this economy is the repeated use of forums to operate online stolen data markets. Using interaction data from three prominent carding forums: Shadowcrew, Cardersmarket and Darkmarket, this study sets out to understand why forums are repeatedly chosen to operate online stolen data markets despite numerous successful infiltrations by law enforcement in the past. Drawing on theories from criminology, social psychology, economics and network science, this study has identified four fundamental socio-economic mechanisms offered by carding forums: (1) formal control and coordination; (2) social networking; (3) identity uncertainty mitigation; (4) quality uncertainty mitigation. Together, they give rise to a sophisticated underground market regulatory system that facilitates underground trading over the Internet and thus drives the expansion of the underground economy

Crime applications and social machines: crowdsourcing sensitive data

The authors explore some issues with the United Kingdom (U.K.) crime reporting and recording systems which currently produce Open Crime Data. The availability of Open Crime Data seems to create a potential data ecosystem which would encourage crowdsourcing, or the creation of social machines, in order to counter some of these issues. While such solutions are enticing, we suggest that in fact the theoretical solution brings to light fairly compelling problems, which highlight some limitations of crowdsourcing as a means of addressing Berners-Lee’s “social constraint.” The authors present a thought experiment – a Gendankenexperiment - in order to explore the implications, both good and bad, of a social machine in such a sensitive space and suggest a Web Science perspective to pick apart the ramifications of this thought experiment as a theoretical approach to the characterisation of social machine

Location data and privacy: a framework for analysis

Innovative services have exploited data about users’ physical location, sometimes but not always explicitly with their consent. As new applications that reveal users’ location data appear on the Web it essential to focus on the privacy implications, in particular with respect to inferences about context. This paper focuses on the understanding of location and contextual privacy by developing a framework for analysis, which is applied to existing systems that exploit location data. The analysis highlights the primal role of location in linking and inferring contextual data, but also how these inferences can extend to non-contextual data

From gene mutation to protein characterization

A seven-week “gene to protein” laboratory sequence is described for an undergraduate biochemistry laboratory course. Student pairs were given the task of introducing a point mutation of their choosing into the well studied protein, enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). After conducting literature searches, each student group chose the mutation they wanted to introduce into EGFP. Students designed their sequence-specific mutagenic primers and constructed their desired mutation. The resulting EGFP mutant proteins were expressed in E. coli, purified and characterized. This laboratory sequence connected the major concepts of molecular biology and biochemistry, while incorporating the thrill of novel discovery in an undergraduate-level biochemistry laboratory course

The Arab Spring: Developments in North Africa and the Middle East

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.The Arab Spring: Developments in North Africa and the Middle East will bring perspectives from the field that give new meaning to events reported in the news. The focus will be on the supporters of the protests and revolutions — who is funding the revolutions and counter revolutions -- as well as democracy and representation in diverse Middle Eastern contexts; war's toll on Libyans and potentially on Syrians; international impact and response-in Europe; refugees; NATO involvement; and protests by Saudi women. The panel will examine the Arab Spring as a whole and in specific contexts.Ohio State University. Middle East Studies CenterOhio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Steroidogenic Acute Regulatory Protein (StAR): Evidence of Gonadotropin-Induced Steroidogenesis in Alzheimer Disease

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer disease (AD) is clinically characterized by progressive memory loss, impairments in behavior, language and visual-spatial skills and ultimately, death. Epidemiological data reporting the predisposition of women to AD has led to a number of lines of evidence suggesting that age-related changes in hormones of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis following reproductive senescence, may contribute to the etiology of AD. Recent studies from our group and others have reported not only increases in circulating gonadotropins, namely luteinizing hormone (LH) in individuals with AD compared with control individuals, but also significant elevations of LH in vulnerable neuronal populations in individuals with AD compared to control cases as well as the highest density of gonadotropin receptors in the brain are found within the hippocampus, a region devastated in AD. However, while LH is higher in AD patients, the downstream consequences of this are incompletely understood. To begin to examine this issue, here, we examined the expression levels of steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein, which regulates the first key event in steroidogenesis, namely, the transport of cholesterol into the mitochondria, and is regulated by LH through the cyclic AMP second messenger pathway, in AD and control brain tissue. RESULTS: Our data revealed that StAR protein was markedly increased in both the cytoplasm of hippocampal pyramidal neurons as well as in the cytoplasm of other non-neuronal cell types from AD brains when compared with age-matched controls. Importantly, and suggestive of a direct mechanistic link, StAR protein expression in AD brains colocalized with LH receptor expression. CONCLUSION: Therefore, our findings suggest that LH is not only able to bind to its receptor and induce potentially pathogenic signaling in AD, but also that steroidogenic pathways regulated by LH may play a role in AD

Monte Carlo simulation for jet fragmentation in SUSY-QCD

We present results from a new Monte Carlo simulation for jet fragmentation in QCD and SUSY QCD for large primary energies $\sqrt s$ up to $10^{16}$ GeV. In the case of SUSY QCD the simulation takes into account not only gluons and quarks as cascading particles, but also their supersymmetric partners. A new model-independent hadronization scheme is developed, in which the hadronization functions are found from LEP data. An interesting feature of SUSY QCD is the prediction of a sizeable flux of the lightest supersymmetric particles (LSPs), if R-parity is conserved. About 10% of the jet energy is transferred to LSPs which, owing to their harder spectra, constitute an important part of the spectra for large $x=E/E_{jet}$. Spectra of protons and of secondary particles, photons and neutrinos, are also calculated. These results have implications for the decay of superheavy particles with masses up to the GUT scale, which have been suggested as a source of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays.Comment: latex, 25 pages with 17 eps figure

Cluster-randomised trial to evaluate the 'Change for Life' mass media/ social marketing campaign in the UK

Social marketing campaigns offer a promising approach to the prevention of childhood obesity. Change4Life (C4L) is a national obesity prevention campaign in England. It included mass media coverage aiming to reframe obesity into a health issue relevant to all and provided the opportunity for parents to complete a brief questionnaire ('How are the Kids') and receive personalised feedback about their children's eating and activity. Print and online C4L resources were available with guidance about healthy eating and physical activity. The study aims were to examine the impact of personalised feedback and print material from the C4L campaign on parents' attitudes and behaviours about their children's eating and activity in a community-based cluster-randomised controlled trial

Emerging roles for hyaluronidase in cancer metastasis and therapy

Hyaluronidases are a family of five human enzymes that have been differentially implicated in the progression of many solid tumor types, both clinically and in functional studies. Advances in the past five years have clarified many apparent contradictions, (1) by demonstrating that specific hyaluronidases have alternative substrates to hyaluronan (HA) or do not exhibit any enzymatic activity, (2) that high molecular weight HA polymers elicit signaling effects that are opposite those of the hyaluronidase-digested HA oligomers, and (3) that it is actually the combined overexpression of HA synthesizing enzymes with hyaluronidases that confers tumorigenic potential. This review examines the literature supporting these conclusions and discusses novel mechanisms by which hyaluronidases impact invasive tumor cell processes. In addition, a detailed structural and functional comparison of the hyaluronidases is presented with insights into substrate selectivity and potential for therapeutic targeting. Finally, technological advances in targeting hyaluronidase for tumor imaging and cancer therapy are summarized