Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Vakilinia, I.  [Clear All Filters]
2021-03-09
Lingenfelter, B., Vakilinia, I., Sengupta, S..  2020.  Analyzing Variation Among IoT Botnets Using Medium Interaction Honeypots. 2020 10th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC). :0761—0767.

Through analysis of sessions in which files were created and downloaded on three Cowrie SSH/Telnet honeypots, we find that IoT botnets are by far the most common source of malware on connected systems with weak credentials. We detail our honeypot configuration and describe a simple method for listing near-identical malicious login sessions using edit distance. A large number of IoT botnets attack our honeypots, but the malicious sessions which download botnet software to the honeypot are almost all nearly identical to one of two common attack patterns. It is apparent that the Mirai worm is still the dominant botnet software, but has been expanded and modified by other hackers. We also find that the same loader devices deploy several different botnet malware strains to the honeypot over the course of a 40 day period, suggesting multiple botnet deployments from the same source. We conclude that Mirai continues to be adapted but can be effectively tracked using medium interaction honeypots such as Cowrie.

2018-01-10
Vakilinia, I., Tosh, D. K., Sengupta, S..  2017.  3-Way game model for privacy-preserving cybersecurity information exchange framework. MILCOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM). :829–834.

With the growing number of cyberattack incidents, organizations are required to have proactive knowledge on the cybersecurity landscape for efficiently defending their resources. To achieve this, organizations must develop the culture of sharing their threat information with others for effectively assessing the associated risks. However, sharing cybersecurity information is costly for the organizations due to the fact that the information conveys sensitive and private data. Hence, making the decision for sharing information is a challenging task and requires to resolve the trade-off between sharing advantages and privacy exposure. On the other hand, cybersecurity information exchange (CYBEX) management is crucial in stabilizing the system through setting the correct values for participation fees and sharing incentives. In this work, we model the interaction of organizations, CYBEX, and attackers involved in a sharing system using dynamic game. With devising appropriate payoff models for each player, we analyze the best strategies of the entities by incorporating the organizations' privacy component in the sharing model. Using the best response analysis, the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed framework.