Biblio

The need for cybersecurity knowledge and skills is constantly growing as our lives become more integrated with the digital world. In order to meet this demand, educational institutions must continue to innovate within the field of cybersecurity education and make this educational process as effective and efficient as possible. We seek to accomplish this goal by taking an existing cybersecurity educational technology and adding automated grading and assessment functionality to it. This will reduce costs and maximize scalability by reducing or even eliminating the need for human graders.

An information system is only as secure as its weakest point. In many information systems that remains to be the human factor, despite continuous attempts to educate the users about the importance of password security and enforcing password creation policies on them. Furthermore, not only do the average users' password creation and management habits remain more or less the same, but the password cracking tools, and more importantly, the computer hardware, keep improving as well. In this study, we performed a broad targeted attack combining several well-established cracking techniques, such as brute-force, dictionary, and hybrid attacks, on the passwords used by the students of a Slovenian university to access the online grading system. Our goal was to demonstrate how easy it is to crack most of the user-created passwords using simple and predictable patterns. To identify differences between them, we performed an analysis of the cracked and uncracked passwords and measured their strength. The results have shown that even a single low to mid-range modern GPU can crack over 95% of passwords in just few days, while a more dedicated system can crack all but the strongest 0.5% of them.

Development of information systems dealing with education and labour market using web and grid service architecture enables their modularity, expandability and interoperability. Application of ontologies to the web helps with collecting and selecting the knowledge about a certain field in a generic way, thus enabling different applications to understand, use, reuse and share the knowledge among them. A necessary step before publishing computer-interpretable data on the public web is the implementation of common standards that will ensure the exchange of information. Croatian Qualification Framework (CROQF) is a project of standardization of occupations for the labour market, as well as standardization of sets of qualifications, skills and competences and their mutual relations. This paper analysis a respectable amount of research dealing with application of ontologies to information systems in education during the last decade. The main goal is to compare achieved results according to: 1) phases of development/classifications of education-related ontologies; 2) areas of education and 3) standards and structures of metadata for educational systems. Collected information is used to provide insight into building blocks of CROQF, both the ones well supported by experience and best practices, and the ones that are not, together with guidelines for development of own standards using ontological structures.

As the centers of knowledge, discovery, and intellectual exploration, US universities provide appealing cybersecurity targets. Cyberattack origin patterns and relationships are not evident until data is visualized in maps and tested with statistical models. The current cybersecurity threat detection software utilized by University of North Florida's IT department records large amounts of attacks and attempted intrusions by the minute. This paper presents GIS mapping and spatial analysis of cybersecurity attacks on UNF. First, locations of cyberattack origins were detected by geographic Internet Protocol (GEO-IP) software. Second, GIS was used to map the cyberattack origin locations. Third, we used advanced spatial statistical analysis functions (exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial point pattern analysis) and R software to explore cyberattack patterns. The spatial perspective we promote is novel because there are few studies employing location analytics and spatial statistics in cyber-attack detection and prevention research.