Using Business Process Model Awareness to improve Stakeholder Participation in Information Systems Security Risk Management Processes

The present paper examines stakeholders\u27 business process model awareness to measure and improve stakeholder participation in information systems security risk management (ISRM) via a multi-method research study at the organizational level. Organizational stakeholders were interviewed to gain an understanding of their awareness of business processes and related security requirements in the context of an ongoing ISRM process. The research model was evaluated in four case studies. The findings indicate that stakeholders\u27 awareness of business process models contributed to an improved ISRM process, better alignment to the business environment and improved elicitation of security requirements. Following current research that considers users as the most important resource in ISRM, this study highlights the importance of involving appropriate stakeholders at the right time during the ISRM process and provides risk managers with decision support for the prioritization of stakeholder participation during ISRM processes to improve results and reduce overhead

Knowledge Protection for Digital Innovations: Integrating Six Perspectives

New ways of combining digital and physical innovations, as well as intensified inter-organizational collaborations, create new challenges to the protection of organizational knowledge. Existing research on knowledge protection is at an early stage and scattered among various research domains. This research-in-progress paper presents a plan for a structured literature review on knowledge protection, integrating the perspectives of the six base domains of knowledge, strategic, risk, intellectual property rights, innovation, and information technology security management. We define knowledge protection as a set of capabilities comprising and enforcing technical, organizational, and legal mechanisms to protect tacit and explicit knowledge necessary to generate or adopt innovations

Threat Intelligence Sharing Platforms: An Exploratory Study of Software Vendors and Research Perspectives

In the last couple of years, organizations have demonstrated an increased willingness to exchange information and knowledge regarding vulnerabilities, threats, incidents and mitigation strategies in order to collectively protect against today’s sophisticated cyberattacks. As a reaction to this trend, software vendors started to create offerings that facilitate this exchange and appear under the umbrella term “Threat Intelligence Sharing Platforms”. To which extent these platforms provide the needed means for exchange and information sharing remains unclear as they lack a common definition, innovation in this area is mostly driven by vendors and empirical research is rare. To close this gap, we examine the state-of-the-art software vendor landscape of these platforms, identify gaps and present arising research perspectives. Therefore, we conducted a systematic study of 22 threat intelligence sharing platforms and compared them. We derived eight key findings and discuss how existing gaps should be addressed by future research

Identification of Basophils as a Major Source of Hepatocyte Growth Factor in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: A Novel Mechanism of BCR-ABL1-Independent Disease Progression

AbstractChronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a hematopoietic neoplasm characterized by the Philadelphia chromosome and the related BCR-ABL1 oncoprotein. Acceleration of CML is usually accompanied by basophilia. Several proangiogenic molecules have been implicated in disease acceleration, including the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). However, little is known so far about the cellular distribution and function of HGF in CML. We here report that HGF is expressed abundantly in purified CML basophils and in the basophil-committed CML line KU812, whereas all other cell types examined expressed only trace amounts of HGF or no HGF. Interleukin 3, a major regulator of human basophils, was found to promote HGF expression in CML basophils. By contrast, BCR-ABL1 failed to induce HGF synthesis in CML cells, and imatinib failed to inhibit expression of HGF in these cells. Recombinant HGF as well as basophil-derived HGF induced endothelial cell migration in a scratch wound assay, and these effects of HGF were reverted by an anti-HGF antibody as well as by pharmacologic c-Met inhibitors. In addition, anti-HGF and c-Met inhibitors were found to suppress the spontaneous growth of KU812 cells, suggesting autocrine growth regulation. Together, HGF is a BCR-ABL1-independent angiogenic and autocrine growth regulator in CML. Basophils are a unique source of HGF in these patients and may play a more active role in disease-associated angiogenesis and disease progression than has so far been assumed. Our data also suggest that HGF and c-Met are potential therapeutic targets in CML

Identification of regulatory variants associated with genetic susceptibility to meningococcal disease.

Non-coding genetic variants play an important role in driving susceptibility to complex diseases but their characterization remains challenging. Here, we employed a novel approach to interrogate the genetic risk of such polymorphisms in a more systematic way by targeting specific regulatory regions relevant for the phenotype studied. We applied this method to meningococcal disease susceptibility, using the DNA binding pattern of RELA - a NF-kB subunit, master regulator of the response to infection - under bacterial stimuli in nasopharyngeal epithelial cells. We designed a custom panel to cover these RELA binding sites and used it for targeted sequencing in cases and controls. Variant calling and association analysis were performed followed by validation of candidate polymorphisms by genotyping in three independent cohorts. We identified two new polymorphisms, rs4823231 and rs11913168, showing signs of association with meningococcal disease susceptibility. In addition, using our genomic data as well as publicly available resources, we found evidences for these SNPs to have potential regulatory effects on ATXN10 and LIF genes respectively. The variants and related candidate genes are relevant for infectious diseases and may have important contribution for meningococcal disease pathology. Finally, we described a novel genetic association approach that could be applied to other phenotypes

Dezentrale Transaktionseinheiten als E-Geld

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Einordnung von Transaktionseinheiten dezentraler Transaktionssysteme als E-Geld. Während die derzeit vorherrschende Lehre bei Nicht-Einordnung von Token in bestehende Regime nach dem Ausschlussprinzip (zB Verneinung Einordnung als Wertpapier, Verneinung Einordnung als E-Geld) regelmäßig für einzelne Transaktionseinheiten das Fehlen jeglicher aufsichtsrechtlicher Anknüpfungspunkte bejaht, ergibt eine detaillierte Betrachtung der technischen Rahmenbedingungen und E-Geld-Tatbestandsmerkmale ein anderes Bild: Transaktionseinheiten gängiger dezentraler Transaktionssysteme sind in nahezu allen Fällen problemlos unter den E-Geld-Begriff subsumierbar

Using Business Process Model Awareness to improve Stakeholder Participation in Information Systems Security Risk Management Processes

Abstract. The present paper examines stakeholders' business process model awareness to measure and improve stakeholder participation in information systems security risk management (ISRM) via a multi-method research study at the organizational level. Organizational stakeholders were interviewed to gain an understanding of their awareness of business processes and related security requirements in the context of an ongoing ISRM process. The research model was evaluated in four case studies. The findings indicate that stakeholders' awareness of business process models contributed to an improved ISRM process, better alignment to the business environment and improved elicitation of security requirements. Following current research that considers users as the most important resource in ISRM, this study highlights the importance of involving appropriate stakeholders at the right time during the ISRM process and provides risk managers with decision support for the prioritization of stakeholder participation during ISRM processes to improve results and reduce overhead

AN INFORMATION SYSTEM AGNOSTIC ENVIRONMENT FOR REPRODUCIBLE EXPERIMENTS

Designing reproducible experiments with information systems (IS) is a challenging task, mainly due to the complex nature of processes, vendor specific tools and the difficulty to find an adequate abstraction level. While technical challenges (e.g. finding performance bottlenecks) can be investigated in detail using simplified near-life settings or purposive research prototypes, these approaches are not feasible in experiments concerned with IS used in complex environments and problem domains (e.g. governance, risk and compliance management) as the software often cannot be simplified without considerable effort or losing rigor. On the other hand, software used in such domains has almost never been designed by the vendors with researchers’ goals and needs in mind which makes their usage in experiments burdensome. To address this, we present the research prototype of an experimentation environment that simplifies the creation of reproducible experiments around off-the-shelf information systems