1,504 research outputs found

    UC-30 Malware Analysis Using Reverse Engineering

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    Cybercrimes are a billion-dollar industry that is rapidly growing by the day. One of the biggest threats faced by companies is the infection of malware. New forms of malware are created daily and ever evolving to evade detection methods. Understanding how malware infects your system and how it eludes detection is crucial to keeping a company\u27s network and devices safe. During this project we will be using reverse engineering methods to better understand the functionality of malware, as well as how it eludes detection. We will be using IDAPro and WiDbg to perform the reverse engineering. Using this knowledge, we will create a set of security standards to help companies to protect themselves from these infections. We will also create a document on how to secure a virtual machine for malware analysis. This will help future students who also are interested in analyzing malware themselves. Our preliminary results include understanding some of the most used forms of malware evasion techniques. These techniques include stalling delays, which is when a piece of malware remains idle to defeat time-based antivirus scans. Another technique is action required delays, which is when a piece of malware will only execute once an action or group of actions are performed this will trigger the malware to execute. Another way that malware is able to evade detection is fragmentation. In this technique the malware will split into multiple different fragments, which alone do not raise flags as suspicious, then rejoin and execute.Advisors(s): Dr. Hossain ShahriarTopic(s): SecurityIT 498

    Overly honest data repository development

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    After a year of development, the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched a repository, called the Illinois Data Bank (https://databank.illinois.edu/), to provide Illinois researchers with a free, self-serve publishing platform that centralizes, preserves, and provides persistent and reliable access to Illinois research data. This article presents a holistic view of development by discussing our overarching technical, policy, and interface strategies. By openly presenting our design decisions, the rationales behind those decisions, and associated challenges this paper aims to contribute to the library community’s work to develop repository services that meet growing data preservation and sharing needs.Ope

    Infrared Excess and Molecular Clouds: A comparison of new suerveys of far-infrared and H I 21-cm emission at high galactic latitudes

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    We have created a map of the large-scale infrared surface brightness in excess of that associated with the atomic interstellar medium, using region-by-region correlations between the far-infrared and 21-cm line surface brightness. Our study updates and extends a previous attempt with IRAS and Berkeley/Parkes H I surveys. The far-infrared observations used here are from DIRBE, which extends far-infrared wavelength coverage to 240 um, so that we are reliably sampling the emission of large, thermal-equilibrium grains that dominate the dust mass. The H I data are from the combined Leiden-Dwingeloo and Parkes 21-cm line surveys. Using the maps of excess infrared emission at 100, 140, and 240 um, we created an atlas and identified the coherent structures. These infrared excess clouds can be caused both by dust that is warmer than average, or by dust associated with gas other than the atomic interstellar medium. We find very few warm clouds, such as the H II region around Spica. The majority of the infrared excess clouds are colder than the average atomic interstellar medium. These clouds are peaks of column density, and their excess infrared emission is due to dust associated with molecular gas. We identify essentially all known high-latitude molecular clouds in the infrared excess maps, and further identify a sample of new clouds with similar infrared properties. The infrared excess was correlated with CO line brightness, allowing us to measure the ratio of N(H2)/W(CO) for high-latitude clouds. The atlas of infrared excess may be a useful guide to regions of relatively high column density, which might cause high extinction toward extragalactic objects at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths and confusion for cosmic infrared and microwave backgrounds.Comment: * manuscript in 3 TeX files, 12 figures in 15 gif files submitted to the Astrophysical Journal on Feb. 12, 1998 * this version contains a new version of Figs. 7-8, with the correct cloud name

    Broad clinical phenotypes associated with TAR-DNA binding protein (TARDBP) mutations in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

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    The finding of TDP-43 as a major component of ubiquitinated protein inclusions in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has led to the identification of 30 mutations in the transactive response-DNA binding protein (TARDBP) gene, encoding TDP-43. All but one are in exon 6, which encodes the glycine-rich domain. The aim of this study was to determine the frequency of TARDBP mutations in a large cohort of motor neurone disease patients from Northern England (42 non-superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) familial ALS (FALS), nine ALS-frontotemporal dementia, 474 sporadic ALS (SALS), 45 progressive muscular atrophy cases). We identified four mutations, two of which were novel, in two familial (FALS) and two sporadic (SALS) cases, giving a frequency of TARDBP mutations in non-SOD1 FALS of 5% and SALS of 0.4%. Analysis of clinical data identified that patients had typical ALS, with limb or bulbar onset, and showed considerable variation in age of onset and rapidity of disease course. However, all cases had an absence of clinically overt cognitive dysfunction

    Weak pairwise correlations imply strongly correlated network states in a neural population

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    Biological networks have so many possible states that exhaustive sampling is impossible. Successful analysis thus depends on simplifying hypotheses, but experiments on many systems hint that complicated, higher order interactions among large groups of elements play an important role. In the vertebrate retina, we show that weak correlations between pairs of neurons coexist with strongly collective behavior in the responses of ten or more neurons. Surprisingly, we find that this collective behavior is described quantitatively by models that capture the observed pairwise correlations but assume no higher order interactions. These maximum entropy models are equivalent to Ising models, and predict that larger networks are completely dominated by correlation effects. This suggests that the neural code has associative or error-correcting properties, and we provide preliminary evidence for such behavior. As a first test for the generality of these ideas, we show that similar results are obtained from networks of cultured cortical neurons.Comment: Full account of work presented at the conference on Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE), 17-20 March 2005, in Salt Lake City, Utah (http://cosyne.org
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