Emerging Cyber Threats Research Articles

Informing Cyber Threat Intelligence through Dark Web Situational Awareness: The AZSecure Hacker Assets Portal

To increase situational awareness, major cybersecurity platforms offer Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) about emerging cyber threats, key threat actors, and their modus operandi. However, this intelligence is often reactive, as it analyzes event log files after attacks have already occurred, lacking more active scrutiny of potential threats brewing in cyberspace before an attack has occurred. One intelligence source receiving significant attention is the Dark Web, where significant quantities of malicious hacking tools and other cyber assets are hosted. We present the AZSecure Hacker Assets Portal (HAP). The Dark Web-based HAP collects, analyzes, and reports on the major Dark Web data sources to offer unique perspective of hackers, their cybercriminal assets, and their intentions and motivations, ultimately contributing CTI insights to improve situational awareness. HAP currently supports 200+ users internationally from academic institutions such as UT San Antonio and National Taiwan University, law enforcement entities such as Calgary and Ontario Provincial Police, and industry organizations including General Electric and PayPal.

Competence in Cybercrime: A Review of Existing Laws

Transformational cyber security and training programmes are urgently required to produce individuals and workforce capable of addressing company risks posed by existing and emerging cyber threats. This paper presents a cyber security model of India and give an analytical approach to the competence with the crime, a continuous hierarchy of learning. The chapter combines the cyber-security domain, academic development, and the pyramid of learning continuum, as well as cyber-security standards from state, to create a model of cyber-security skills appropriate for people’s education and the broader workforce. This fundamental approach to building cyber skills and training programmes results in trained individuals and workers who can reduce cyber hazards in the business environment throughout the globe. In popular culture, such experts are sometimes depicted as lone hackers. Cybersecurity specialists, on the other hand, must communicate with a variety of people all of the time. They must also have a high level of personal integrity. The practise of cyber hunting is a different approach to traditional cyber security, in which technologies and human intelligence are used to discover potential threats. Using firewall, antivirus, and intrusion detection software, this strategy seeks to detect penetration and prevent hacker penetration.

SDN-Enabled Hybrid DL-Driven Framework for the Detection of Emerging Cyber Threats in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has proven to be a billion-dollar industry. Despite offering numerous benefits, the prevalent nature of IoT makes it vulnerable and a possible target for the development of cyber-attacks. The diversity of the IoT, on the one hand, leads to the benefits of the integration of devices into a smart ecosystem, but the heterogeneous nature of the IoT makes it difficult to come up with a single security solution. However, the centralized intelligence and programmability of software-defined networks (SDNs) have made it possible to compose a single and effective security solution to cope with cyber threats and attacks. We present an SDN-enabled architecture leveraging hybrid deep learning detection algorithms for the efficient detection of cyber threats and attacks while considering the resource-constrained IoT devices so that no burden is placed on them. We use a state-of-the-art dataset, CICDDoS 2019, to train our algorithm. The results evaluated by this algorithm achieve high accuracy with a minimal false positive rate (FPR) and testing time. We also perform 10-fold cross-validation, proving our results to be unbiased, and compare our results with current benchmark algorithms.

Ethics, Encryption, and Evolving Concepts of Personal Privacy in the ‘Black Box Library’

ABSTRACT “The American Library Association affirms that rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethical practice of librarianship,” reads a position paper by the ALA. Protecting user privacy is a cherished ethical position held within this field. Therefore, it is worth asking whether libraries have been aggressive enough to protect this standard, given the rapid advancement of information technology, digital surveillance, cybercrime, commercial exploitation of user data, and emerging privacy threats for the individual and culture. This paper seeks to reconcile the ethical vision with the hard reality that emerging cyber threats can easily circumvent basic library efforts to protect user data. The author imagines the “black box” library, which would be the end result of radical adherence to the ethical standard. In short, the “black box” library would protect freedom of conscience for the user by adhering to extremely rigorous standards, including: Mass encryption, proxy services, legal enforcement of privacy provisions in vendor contracts, recordless inventory systems, and other strict measures. The vision is for a space where critical information flows in, but very little if any “digital exhaust” escapes it.

Cybersecurity Politics – Conceptualization of the Idea

The cybersecurity issue discussed in the paper is seen from the perspective of political science with the indication that the subject under discussion concerns the multifaceted nature of the state’s actions, which consists of political, economic, social, and cultural factors. At the same time, the work also intends to prove that cybersecurity is not only a domain of technology because it is the mentioned aspects that shape the conditions of stable development of the state and its citizens in a space dominated by cyber technology in a much more decisive way. Given the growing role of cybertechnology in almost all areas of human life, its importance also forces and inspires political science to question the shape and model of modern policy, which is significantly evolving under the influence of new technologies. On the one hand, emerging cyber threats reveal the weakness of the state and the dependence of state institutions on cybertechnologies, but on the other hand, existing cyber incidents may also motivate many governments to take action to increase the level of cybersecurity.

Interoperability Challenges in the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Ecosystem

Threat intelligence helps businesses and organisations make the right decisions in their fight against cyber threats, and strategically design their digital defences for an optimised and up-to-date security situation. Combined with advanced security analysis, threat intelligence helps reduce the time between the detection of an attack and its containment. This is achieved by continuously providing information, accompanied by data, on existing and emerging cyber threats and vulnerabilities affecting corporate networks. This paper addresses challenges that organisations are bound to face when they decide to invest in effective and interoperable cybersecurity information sharing and categorises them in a layered model. Based on this, it provides an evaluation of existing sources that share cybersecurity information. The aim of this research is to help organisations improve their cyber threat information exchange capabilities, to enhance their security posture and be more prepared against emerging threats.

Trends in Existing and Emerging Cyber Threat Intelligence Platforms

The purpose of this paper is to present comparative analysis of cyber threat intelligence platforms and their features. This work include comparative analysis of existing ontologies for cyber threat collectors/sensor, data enrichment and data analytical techniques used for raw data analysis and community models for sharing cyber threats, intelligence and countermeasures. Firstly, this work performs comparative analysis of various data sensors designed for collecting raw data from different networks: wired, wireless and mobile. Secondly, detail analysis is performed on various interfaces designed to map ontologies into schemas. Thirdly, efficient methods for data analysis are considered for comparative and detailed report. These method extracts threat information from raw data. Lastly, various cybersecurity community models are analyzed with an aim of identifying an efficient cyber threat sharing model. It is observed that ontology based data sensor mechanisms are more efficient as compared to taxonomy models. It helps in identifying various cyber threats in stipulated time period. In another observation, it is found that decision tree based data analytical techniques are more efficient for critical infrastructure based cyber threat intelligence systems as compared to other machine learning techniques. Further, open source community for cyber threat sharing is efficient if it allows everyone to share their threat information, create groups for specialized interests and keep logs of every subscriber. The proposed analysis is performed for open source and commercial cyber threat sharing platforms however various ontology models are available for intrusion detection systems in cyberspace. This work may be extended for other ontology models, deep learning threat analytical models and quality based threat sharing communities for non-IT sectors like: gas plants, water and electricity supply system etc. The proposed cybersecurity platform is useful for various practical systems where need of cybersecurity is increasing day by day. For example, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems like: energy, oil/gas, transportation, power, water and waste water management systems etc.

RETRACTED: Prevailing and emerging cyber threats and security practices in IoT-Enabled smart grids: A survey

RETRACTED: Prevailing and emerging cyber threats and security practices in IoT-Enabled smart grids: A survey

Multi-stage crypto ransomware attacks: A new emerging cyber threat to critical infrastructure and industrial control systems

Abstract The inevitable integration of critical infrastructure to public networks has exposed the underlying industrial control systems to various attack vectors. In this paper, we model multi-stage crypto ransomware attacks, which are today an emerging cyber threat to critical infrastructure. We evaluate our modeling approach using multi-stage attacks by the infamous WannaCry ransomware. The static malware analysis results uncover the techniques employed by the ransomware to discover vulnerable nodes in different SCADA and production subnets, and for the subsequent network propagation. Based on the uncovered artifacts, we recommend a cascaded network segmentation approach, which prioritizes the security of production network devices.

Examining Hacker Participation Length in Cybercriminal Internet-Relay-Chat Communities

To further cybersecurity, there is interest in studying online cybercriminal communities to learn more about emerging cyber threats. Literature documents the existence of many online Internet Relay Chat (IRC) cybercriminal communities where cybercriminals congregate and share hacking tools, malware, and more. However, many cybercriminal community participants appear unskilled and have fleeting interests, making it difficult to detect potential long-term or key participants. This is a challenge for researchers and practitioners to quickly identify cybercriminals that may provide credible threat intelligence. Thus, we propose a computational approach to analyze cybercriminals IRC communities in order to identify potential long-term and key participants. We use the extended Cox model to scrutinize cybercriminal IRC participation for better understanding of behaviors exhibited by cybercriminals of importance. Results indicate that key cybercriminals may be quickly identifiable by assessing the scale of their interaction and networks with other participants.

How the Design and Evolution of the United States Cyber Command Affect Its Operations

The establishment of the United States Cyber Command presents interesting research opportunities in the areas of national security agency design and national security decision making in the executive branch. This paper will examine Defense Department efforts to address emerging cyber threats by applying Zegart’s framework for agency design and agency evolution to the establishment of the command. Specifically, it explores how the policy making processes used to address cyber security and manage the Unified Command Plan affected operations. The policy implications in the conclusion may allow the Defense Department to improve military operations in cyberspace and bolster U.S. national security.

Emerging Cyber Threats in Bangladesh: In Quest of Effective Legal Remedies

With the advent of technology human beings are becoming exclusively dependant on automation and we can see its influence on all spheres of our life. The history of automation began when Babbage invented computer and especially a new horizon was opened before us with the invention of network particularly the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). Internet has become the backbone of all kinds of communication systems and it is also one of the most important sources of knowledge in the present digitalized world. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/nujl.v1i0.18529 Northern University Journal of Law Vol.1 2010: 112-124