Biblio

Phishing as one of the most well-known cybercrime activities is a deception of online users to steal their personal or confidential information by impersonating a legitimate website. Several machine learning-based strategies have been proposed to detect phishing websites. These techniques are dependent on the features extracted from the website samples. However, few studies have actually considered efficient feature selection for detecting phishing attacks. In this work, we investigate an agreement on the definitive features which should be used in phishing detection. We apply Fuzzy Rough Set (FRS) theory as a tool to select most effective features from three benchmarked data sets. The selected features are fed into three often used classifiers for phishing detection. To evaluate the FRS feature selection in developing a generalizable phishing detection, the classifiers are trained by a separate out-of-sample data set of 14,000 website samples. The maximum F-measure gained by FRS feature selection is 95% using Random Forest classification. Also, there are 9 universal features selected by FRS over all the three data sets. The F-measure value using this universal feature set is approximately 93% which is a comparable result in contrast to the FRS performance. Since the universal feature set contains no features from third-part services, this finding implies that with no inquiry from external sources, we can gain a faster phishing detection which is also robust toward zero-day attacks.

Cloud computing paradigm continues to revolutionize the way business processes are being conducted through the provision of massive resources, reliability across networks and ability to offer parallel processing. However, miniaturization, proliferation and nanotechnology within devices has enabled digitization of almost every object which eventually has seen the rise of a new technological marvel dubbed Internet of Things (IoT). IoT enables self-configurable/smart devices to connect intelligently through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), WI-FI, LAN, GPRS and other methods by further enabling timeously processing of information. Based on these developments, the integration of the cloud and IoT infrastructures has led to an explosion of the amount of data being exchanged between devices which have in turn enabled malicious actors to use this as a platform to launch various cybercrime activities. Consequently, digital forensics provides a significant approach that can be used to provide an effective post-event response mechanism to these malicious attacks in cloud-based IoT infrastructures. Therefore, the problem being addressed is that, at the time of writing this paper, there still exist no accepted standards or frameworks for conducting digital forensic investigation on cloud-based IoT infrastructures. As a result, the authors have proposed a cloud-centric framework that is able to isolate Big data as forensic evidence from IoT (CFIBD-IoT) infrastructures for proper analysis and examination. It is the authors' opinion that if the CFIBD-IoT framework is implemented fully it will support cloud-based IoT tool creation as well as support future investigative techniques in the cloud with a degree of certainty.