205 research outputs found
Japanese Beetle (Popillia japonica Newman)
This fact sheet describes Japanese beetles and reviews damage symptoms, life cycle, monitoring, and management
Testing SOAR Tools in Use
Modern security operation centers (SOCs) rely on operators and a tapestry of
logging and alerting tools with large scale collection and query abilities. SOC
investigations are tedious as they rely on manual efforts to query diverse data
sources, overlay related logs, and correlate the data into information and then
document results in a ticketing system. Security orchestration, automation, and
response (SOAR) tools are a new technology that promise to collect, filter, and
display needed data; automate common tasks that require SOC analysts' time;
facilitate SOC collaboration; and, improve both efficiency and consistency of
SOCs. SOAR tools have never been tested in practice to evaluate their effect
and understand them in use. In this paper, we design and administer the first
hands-on user study of SOAR tools, involving 24 participants and 6 commercial
SOAR tools. Our contributions include the experimental design, itemizing six
characteristics of SOAR tools and a methodology for testing them. We describe
configuration of the test environment in a cyber range, including network,
user, and threat emulation; a full SOC tool suite; and creation of artifacts
allowing multiple representative investigation scenarios to permit testing. We
present the first research results on SOAR tools. We found that SOAR
configuration is critical, as it involves creative design for data display and
automation. We found that SOAR tools increased efficiency and reduced context
switching during investigations, although ticket accuracy and completeness
(indicating investigation quality) decreased with SOAR use. Our findings
indicated that user preferences are slightly negatively correlated with their
performance with the tool; overautomation was a concern of senior analysts, and
SOAR tools that balanced automation with assisting a user to make decisions
were preferred
Concert recording 2018-02-22
[Track 1]. Full tilt / Anthony DiLorenzo -- [Track 2]. Great Lakes octet. I. Shimmering under the sunlight [Track 3]. II. Frozen under winter skies [Track 4]. III. Storm-tossed [Track 5]. IV. Spring horizon / Eric Ewazen -- [Track 6]. Wayfaring stranger / arranged by Chris Woods -- [Track 7]. On a hymnsong of Philip Bliss / David Holsinger translated by William Harbinson -- [Track 8]. Allegretto from Sinfonietta / Leoš Lanáček arranged by Cory Mixdorf -- [Track 9]. October / Eric Whitacre arranged by Christopher E. Hass -- [Track 10]. Fanfare for paratroopers / Paul Creston arranged by Philip Jameson
AI ATAC 1: An Evaluation of Prominent Commercial Malware Detectors
This work presents an evaluation of six prominent commercial endpoint malware
detectors, a network malware detector, and a file-conviction algorithm from a
cyber technology vendor. The evaluation was administered as the first of the
Artificial Intelligence Applications to Autonomous Cybersecurity (AI ATAC)
prize challenges, funded by / completed in service of the US Navy. The
experiment employed 100K files (50/50% benign/malicious) with a stratified
distribution of file types, including ~1K zero-day program executables
(increasing experiment size two orders of magnitude over previous work). We
present an evaluation process of delivering a file to a fresh virtual machine
donning the detection technology, waiting 90s to allow static detection, then
executing the file and waiting another period for dynamic detection; this
allows greater fidelity in the observational data than previous experiments, in
particular, resource and time-to-detection statistics. To execute all 800K
trials (100K files 8 tools), a software framework is designed to
choreographed the experiment into a completely automated, time-synced, and
reproducible workflow with substantial parallelization. A cost-benefit model
was configured to integrate the tools' recall, precision, time to detection,
and resource requirements into a single comparable quantity by simulating costs
of use. This provides a ranking methodology for cyber competitions and a lens
through which to reason about the varied statistical viewpoints of the results.
These statistical and cost-model results provide insights on state of
commercial malware detection
The Protein Maker: an automated system for high-throughput parallel purification
The Protein Maker instrument addresses a critical bottleneck in structural genomics by allowing automated purification and buffer testing of multiple protein targets in parallel with a single instrument. Here, the use of this instrument to (i) purify multiple influenza-virus proteins in parallel for crystallization trials and (ii) identify optimal lysis-buffer conditions prior to large-scale protein purification is described
Evenness mediates the global relationship between forest productivity and richness
1. Biodiversity is an important component of natural ecosystems, with higher species richness often correlating with an increase in ecosystem productivity. Yet, this relationship varies substantially across environments, typically becoming less pronounced at high levels of species richness. However, species richness alone cannot reflect all important properties of a community, including community evenness, which may mediate the relationship between biodiversity and productivity. If the evenness of a community correlates negatively with richness across forests globally, then a greater number of species may not always increase overall diversity and productivity of the system. Theoretical work and local empirical studies have shown that the effect of evenness on ecosystem functioning may be especially strong at high richness levels, yet the consistency of this remains untested at a global scale. 2. Here, we used a dataset of forests from across the globe, which includes composition, biomass accumulation and net primary productivity, to explore whether productivity correlates with community evenness and richness in a way that evenness appears to buffer the effect of richness. Specifically, we evaluated whether low levels of evenness in speciose communities correlate with the attenuation of the richness–productivity relationship. 3. We found that tree species richness and evenness are negatively correlated across forests globally, with highly speciose forests typically comprising a few dominant and many rare species. Furthermore, we found that the correlation between diversity and productivity changes with evenness: at low richness, uneven communities are more productive, while at high richness, even communities are more productive. 4. Synthesis. Collectively, these results demonstrate that evenness is an integral component of the relationship between biodiversity and productivity, and that the attenuating effect of richness on forest productivity might be partly explained by low evenness in speciose communities. Productivity generally increases with species richness, until reduced evenness limits the overall increases in community diversity. Our research suggests that evenness is a fundamental component of biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships, and is of critical importance for guiding conservation and sustainable ecosystem management decisions
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