Offensive Tools Research Articles

Gamma-Mobile-Trio systems are mobile elements rich in bacterial defensive and offensive tools.

The evolutionary arms race between bacteria and phages led to the emergence of bacterial immune systems whose diversity and dynamics remain poorly understood. Here we use comparative genomics to describe a widespread genetic element, defined by the presence of the Gamma-Mobile-Trio (GMT) proteins, that serves as a reservoir of offensive and defensive tools. We demonstrate, using Vibrio parahaemolyticus as a model, that GMT-containing genomic islands are active mobile elements. Furthermore, we show that GMT islands' cargoes contain various anti-phage defence systems, antibacterial type VI secretion system (T6SS) effectors and antibiotic-resistance genes. We reveal four anti-phage defence systems encoded within GMT islands and further characterize one system, GAPS1, showing it is triggered by a phage capsid protein to induce cell dormancy. Our findings underscore the need to broaden the concept of 'defence islands' to include defensive and offensive tools, as both share the same mobile elements for dissemination.

Digital Sentinels and Antagonists: The Dual Nature of Chatbots in Cybersecurity

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing have culminated in sophisticated technologies such as transformer models, generative AI models, and chatbots. Chatbots are sophisticated software applications created to simulate conversation with human users. Chatbots have surged in popularity owing to their versatility and user-friendly nature, which have made them indispensable across a wide range of tasks. This article explores the dual nature of chatbots in the realm of cybersecurity and highlights their roles as both defensive tools and offensive tools. On the one hand, chatbots enhance organizational cyber defenses by providing real-time threat responses and fortifying existing security measures. On the other hand, adversaries exploit chatbots to perform advanced cyberattacks, since chatbots have lowered the technical barrier to generate phishing, malware, and other cyberthreats. Despite the implementation of censorship systems, malicious actors find ways to bypass these safeguards. Thus, this paper first provides an overview of the historical development of chatbots and large language models (LLMs), including their functionality, applications, and societal effects. Next, we explore the dualistic applications of chatbots in cybersecurity by surveying the most representative works on both attacks involving chatbots and chatbots’ defensive uses. We also present experimental analyses to illustrate and evaluate different offensive applications of chatbots. Finally, open issues and challenges regarding the duality of chatbots are highlighted and potential future research directions are discussed to promote responsible usage and enhance both offensive and defensive cybersecurity strategies.

An illiberal economic order: commitment mechanisms become tools of authoritarian coercion

Globalization did not negate state power. It changed the toolkit. We expected the norms and incentives of the liberal economic order to push regimes in places like China and Russia to democratize. Instead, authoritarianism appears to be thriving. This article argues that authoritarians have learned how to take advantage of the institutions underpinning globalization for their own illiberal ends. They use courts in major economic powers to negate the effects of international institutions and to target their political competition. They subvert our expectations by repurposing the basic premises of liberalism – predictability and openness. The article demonstrates these claims by examining how the institutions of multiple international economic regimes, which were designed as constraints, have been turned into offensive tools. The findings illustrate that International Political Economy (IPE) scholars need to begin analyzing how governments learned these tactics and whether we can reconcile the contradictions they exploit.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its Impacts on Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan

The study is intended to describe the newly emerging wave of cyber security threats under the conception of Surveillance Capitalism, which was initially defined by a Harvard university professor, ShoshanaZuboff. The idea of Zuboff emphasizes the use of various formats of data collected from different android software applications that can help regulate the political, social, and economic orientations of the targeted nations. The relevance of Surveillance Capitalism in the nuclearized subcontinent portrays a different picture of the South Asian strategic environment in which New Delhi and Islamabad are the archival nations. The Indian offensive policies obsessed with AntiPakistani behavior have launched a massive campaign on the mainstream social media platforms generally, and Twitter particularly. The use of countless fake social media accounts containing inaccurately maintained material for propagating purposes has become a major offensive tool of New Delhiagainst Islamabad. The Indian strategic community, preoccupied with the critical elements of internal Pakistan issues, is trying to mislead social media users by spreading manipulating facts about the critical nature of civil-military relations in Pakistan. Therefore, the paper's central theme revolves around the strategic dimension of Zuboff’s concept of Surveillance Capitalism and its application to the decades-long Pakistan-India rivalry under the shadows of social media accounts generally and Twitter particularly.

Shot fakes as an indicator of successful offense in basketball.

Past research has shown that tactical skills can increase the offensive output in basketball. Laboratory studies have confirmed this and indicated that fakes are useful, but their effectiveness is a function of expertise. In recent times, experts in the field have been able to correctly identify fakes with a higher accuracy. In this study, the primary objective was to investigate the offensive technical-tactical play shot fakes as a possible performance indicator in real basketball games. Furthermore, we evaluated how the attacker's initial offensive positioning and location on court influence the effectiveness of such shot fakes. We examined 45 NBA games using post-hoc video analyses. Though, on an average, a tenth of all points were scored after a shot fake, our data showed a significantly higher offensive effectiveness of possessions with a shot fake compared to the games' average for all offensive possessions. Moreover, shot fakes were found to be more effective being initially open, and were more often used when the focus player was being covered by a defender. In addition, 73% of all shot fakes were successful and advantageous for the attacker. This result, in conjunction with previous laboratory studies in which experts showed an above average probability of detection, points to the importance of time pressure for representative study designs. The evidence from this study proves that shot fakes are an important and effective offensive tool to gain an advantage over the opponent and increase offensive scoring, thereby setting the foundation for future research on shot fakes across sports.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

CRISPR-Cas system, antibiotic resistance and virulence in bacteria: Through a common lens.

CRISPR-Cas system, antibiotic resistance and virulence are different modes of survival for the bacteria. CRISPR-Cas is an adaptive immune system that can degrade foreign DNA, antibiotic resistance helps bacteria to evade drugs that can threaten their existence and virulence determinants are offensive tools that can facilitate the establishment of infection by pathogens. This chapter focuses on these three aspects, providing insights about the CRISPR system and resistance mechanisms in brief, followed by understanding the synergistic or antagonistic relationship of resistance and virulence determinants in connection to the CRISPR system. We have addressed the discussion of this evolving topic through specific examples and studies. Different approaches for successful detection of this unique defense system in bacteria and various applications of the CRISPR-Cas systems to show how it can be harnessed to tackle the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance have been put forth. World Health Organization has declared antibiotic resistance as a serious global problem of the 21st century. As antibiotic-resistant bacteria increase their footprint across the globe, newer tools such as the CRISPR-Cas system hold immense promise to tackle this problem.

Artificial Intelligence and Crime

This review of the rapidly growing literature on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on crime and crime prevention outlines some of the likely limits and potential of AI applications as a crime enabler or crime fighter. In short, our focus is on the criminogenic potential as well as preventative role of AI. Investment and interest in developing machine learning (ML) technologies that underpin AI capabilities across industry, civil and military applications have grown exponentially in the past decade. This investment in AI research and development has boosted innovation and productivity as well as intensifying competition between states in the race to gain technological advantage. The scale of data acquisition and aggregation essential for the ‘training’ of effective AI via ML processes also poses broader associated risks to privacy and fairness as such technology shifts from a niche to general purpose technology. The potential weaponization of AI applications such as computational marketing, ‘deep’ fake images or news and enhanced surveillance, however, are pressing challenges to democracies and human rights. Poorly implemented ethical, accountability and regulatory measures will also provide opportunities for criminal activity as well as the potential of accidents, unreliability and other unintended consequences. AI is generally described as weak, medium or strong and it is widely understood that the AI currently in use can be classified as weak. This is because the underlying ML iterative processes are based on domain specific or limited ‘training’ particular to the problem or activity addressed and thus offer only narrow or highly focused AI applications. Five major functional areas have stimulated the civil development of AI and these are: ● Voice and Speech Recognition ● Computer Vision ● Extended Reality (XR) ● Game Playing ● Natural Language Processing (NLP) We explore some of the concerns about AI as currently realised and argues that automated decision-making technology should not be relied upon as a sole decision-making tool. Scepticism is currently necessary when evaluating an AI’s performance. The United States White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has warned of the potential threat that AI poses to privacy, civil rights, and individual freedoms through the “Potential of encoding discrimination in automated decisions” (Executive Office of the US President, 2016, p. 45). The various ways in which AI can be used as a defensive or an offensive tool in respect to cybercrime are described and evaluate some of the opportunities and risks that arise when AI is employed either to defend and detect attacks against computer systems or to attack computer systems. A summary of the legal and regulatory dimensions of AI and discusses the extent to which existing laws are sufficiently technologically neutral or ‘future proof’ to incorporate the use and potential ‘misconduct’ or misuse of AI in decision-making. AI applications will also be used to enhance many existing surveillance systems incorporating and aggregating data from different sources including fusing individual biometric data with expenditure and activity transaction records to create ‘whole of life’ behavioural classifiers. PR China’s newly piloted social responsibility system is such a system that ‘scores’ an individual citizen’s conduct (e.g. by rating the ‘social worthiness’ of consumption and activities) so as to prioritise access to state-controlled activities or services (e.g. state offices/jobs, travel, educational or medical services). The ubiquitous melding of data to classify conduct and rate individuals driven by AI algorithms may emerge as the key method of the new surveillance state or corporation. In this sense, AI may also evolve as a self-preserving autonomous system. These new forms of total surveillance will also be a key target for manipulation by criminal actors and others.

The Financial Sector’s Vulnerabilities, Villains, and Options for Defense

The consequences of cyber attacks on the financial sector go well beyond those suffered by the individuals and firms directly involved and may even lead to the destabilization of the system itself. The concern is all the greater given that banks and similar institutions play a much more critical role than most people realize and the nature of their operation already invites risk taking at the best of times. Bad actors hoping to sow chaos surely understand the trouble they could cause by targeting the financial underpinning of our economy. This paper will argue that while the cyber defense of the financial sector should be assigned a high priority, a wide net need not be cast since the greatest threat comes not from national actors but terrorist groups and the like. This suggests a very different strategy than one might adopt in defense of military assets or technology, an indirect approach that aims at disrupting bad actors’ ability to accumulate resources, design offensive tools, and reconnoiter for possible weaknesses. Their greatest challenge is in creating sufficient time and space to plan operations with any more significance than random vandalism and DDOS attacks. Our goal should be to deny them this.

A Method for Identifying Critical Elements of a Cyber-Physical System Under Data Attack

In this paper, we use hyper-network methods to identify the critical elements of a cyber-physical system (CPS) under data attack according to IEC 61850. The related works are introduced first, such as cyber offensive tools, procedures, and data attack models. Some definitions of a hypergraph are presented. Then, considering the functional attributes of logical nodes, a hyper-network model of substation auto system (SAS) is proposed using hyper-graph theory. On this basis, a CPS model that takes into account the functional influence after data attack is established. In addition, combined with the analysis of the network model, the efficiency indexes are given to evaluate the effectiveness of the CPS under data attack. The reasons why we choose these indexes in network and hyper-network model are also explained. Finally, the analysis in the case study illustrates that the method proposed is helpful for identifying critical elements of the CPS, which provides a new avenue for future vulnerability analysis research.

An Integrated Approach to ARP Poisoning and its mitigation using Empirical Paradigm

The primary objective of Cyber Security is to protect data in transit. If a network is vulnerable at layer two, the good fortune opens wide up for an attacker. With the easy availability of refined offensive tools that can exploit these vulnerabilities to create havoc in networks, there is a dire need of mitigative measures that can cope up with increasing threats. ARP Protocol violation is among the most hazardous onslaughts in the wireless networks today. This paper is an effort to implement the mechanism of ARP poisoning and its mitigation by enabling DHCP Snooping and Dynamic ARP Inspection. The attack has been demonstrated under test environment using Cain & Abel, Wireshark and NetworkMiner tools because of their merits. The paper also describes the mechanism of Dynamic ARP Inspection to mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks.

A Review of Latest Techniques to secure Wireless Networks against ARP Poisoning Attacks

Due to increasing network threats, it has become imperative to build a system that is meant to protect the network primarily from intrusion. A discipline that is most oblivious is the layer two of the OSI, which opens the network to dangerous assaults and compromises. Nowadays there are various sophisticated offensive tools and technologies that can exploit these vulnerabilities to create havoc in the tech-savvy generation. ARP spoofing assault is among the most hazardous procedures in local discipline networks. This paper discusses poisoning of Address resolution protocol and the most advanced schemes which mitigate such attacks. This attack has been carried out under test environment for illustrations and various preventive methods against it have been tested and compared. This paper has highlighted in the end an ideal strategy to combat ARP attacks at a superior level than the already existing techniques.

Anti-suit Injunctions from Arbitral Tribunals in International Commercial Arbitration: A Necessary Evil?

Anti-suit injunctions are one of the most heavily criticized remedies that parties can have recourse to in situations of jurisdictional conflicts. Arbitral tribunals generally have power to order anti-suit injunctions, though there are different views on its nature and legal bases for granting. The appropriateness of this remedy is more questionable since it interferes with principles of international law and coordinative rules devised for handling parallel proceedings. Although anti-suit injunction is an offensive tool and should be avoided, nevertheless in the absence of viable alternatives it may be permitted under restrictive conditions. In order to ensure that anti-suit injunction is an adequate solution in a particular case, arbitral tribunals should consider a number of factors, including an apparent risk of conflicting decisions, abusive behaviour of the party, and the practical value of the injunction.

Dual Role of Inflammation in Prognosis and Prevention of Tuberculosis

The high death rate and progressive spread of tuberculosis emphasizes the need to address the complexities associated with the disease and its treatment. Complications associated with the disease are associated with the process of inflammation. Host defense system protects the body against pathogen by various inflammatory responses and the same are utilized by the pathogen as an offensive tool to progress inside the host. The genetic factors which determine the expression of inflammatory markers affect the onset of the disease and its treatment. The susceptibility to infection, progression to active or latent form and dissemination to the other sites are governed by the inflammatory responses generated by the host. The prognosis of tuberculosis is not the pathogenic infection but the outcome of the host- pathogen interactions, most of which are still not understood. In this review we discuss the major host inflammatory responses during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and their role in progression and/or containment of the infection. In addition the possible role of anti-inflammatory drugs as adjunct to the current anti-tuberculosis treatment will be reviewed.

Making Sense with Democratic Dollars: How Congress Can Use the Disclose Act to Incentive Small Donor Participation After Citizens United

In this paper I argue that the Congressional response to Citizens United - the DISCLOSE Act - presents an opportunity to do more than just play defense; if modified just slightly the DISCLOSE Act can be a powerful offensive tool. One small change in the bill would start encouraging smaller donor participation by providing incentives to all non-profit groups that voluntarily agree to contribution limits to their Campaign-Related Activity Accounts. I first lay out what I see as the money in politics problem. I then discuss the effects of the Citizens United ruling on the current landscape and how the DISCLOSE Act aims to mitigate them. I propose a change in the DISCLOSE Act that would keep the small donor trend alive by providing incentives for all non-profit groups such as unions, advocacy groups, and trade organizations, to voluntarily limit their contributions. These incentives would be bundled together and labeled “democratic dollars.” I explain how this label will provide a powerful heuristic in helping voters sort through the cacophony of electioneering communications that flood the airwaves while also respecting First Amendment rights. Focusing on contribution limits for electioneering communications makes all independent election expenditures more democratic by laundering larger contributions through participatory channels. I conclude by evaluating the constitutionality of this proposal in light of doctrine that upholds a similar scheme in the tax code - where organizations get the benefits of §501(c)(3) status in exchange for agreeing not to engage in certain political activities.

Antibacterial Potential of Garlic-Derived Allicin and Its Cancellation by Sulfhydryl Compounds

Allicin (allyl 2-propenethiosulfinate), an antibacterial principle of garlic, has drawn much attention, since it has potent antimicrobial activity against a range of microorganisms, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. There have been many reports on the antibacterial properties of allicin, but no quantitative comparison of antibacterial activities between freshly prepared garlic extract and clinically useful antibiotics has been performed. To verify the substantial antibacterial effect of aqueous garlic extract, we compared it with those of allicin and several clinically useful antibiotics using two representative bacteria commonly found in the human environment, Gram-positive S. aureus and Gram-negative Escherichia coli. The garlic extract had more potent anti-staphylococcal activity than an equal amount of allicin. In terms of antibiotic potency against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, authentic allicin had roughly 1-2% of the potency of streptomycin (vs. S. aureus), 8% of that of vancomycin (vs. S. aureus), and only 0.2% of that of colistin (vs. E. coli). The antibacterial activity of allicin was completely abolished by cysteine, glutathione and coenzyme A, but not by non-SH-compounds. The oxygen in the structure (-S(=O)-S-) of allicin therefore functions to liberate the S-allyl moiety, which might be an offensive tool against bacteria.

Competitive Intelligence: Preparing for the Information War

As information technology pervades more and more aspects of social and commercial life, businesses become increasingly vulnerable to coordinated strategic information-related actions. Concern has been voiced over systems security. However, this represents only a part of the potential threat faced by commercial organizations since they are increasingly facing more sophisticated competitive intelligence efforts. Various national security establishments throughout the world appear to be ahead of their commercial counterparts in recognizing the value of coordinated actions taken to achieve information superiority over their adversaries. National defense strategists have termed this “Information Operations,” (IO) and have recognized its importance as an offensive tool as well the need to defend the state against its use by adversaries. This article argues that given the vagaries of public policy and the resulting political constraints on government actions, the true domain of “Information Operations” is in the commercial arena. Therefore, it is vital for businesses to understand this emerging threat, and to devise strategies to respond to it.

Competitive intelligence: Preparing for the information war

As information technology pervades more and more aspects of social and commercial life, businesses become increasingly vulnerable to coordinated strategic information-related actions. Concern has been voiced over systems security. However, this represents only a part of the potential threat faced by commercial organizations since they are increasingly facing more sophisticated competitive intelligence efforts. Various national security establishments throughout the world appear to be ahead of their commercial counterparts in recognizing the value of coordinated actions taken to achieve information superiority over their adversaries. National defense strategists have termed this “Information Operations,” (IO) and have recognized its importance as an offensive tool as well the need to defend the state against its use by adversaries. This article argues that given the vagaries of public policy and the resulting political constraints on government actions, the true domain of “Information Operations” is in the commercial arena. Therefore, it is vital for businesses to understand this emerging threat, and to devise strategies to respond to it.