Biblio
Web Scraping is the technique of extracting desired data in an automated way by scanning the internal links and content of a website, this activity usually performed by systematically programmed bots. This paper explains our proposed solution to protect the blog content from theft and from being copied to other destinations by mitigating the scraping bots. To achieve our purpose we applied two steps in two levels, the first one, on the main blog page level, mitigated the work of crawler bots by adding extra empty articles anchors among real articles, and the next step, on the article page level, we add a random number of empty and hidden spans with randomly generated text among the article's body. To assess this solution we apply it to a local project developed using PHP language in Laravel framework, and put four criteria that measure the effectiveness. The results show that the changes in the file size before and after the application do not affect it, also, the processing time increased by few milliseconds which still in the acceptable range. And by using the HTML-similarity tool we get very good results that show the symmetric over style, with a few bit changes over the structure. Finally, to assess the effects on the bots, scraper bot reused and get the expected results from the programmed middleware. These results show that the solution is feasible to be adopted and use to protect blogs content.
Writing style is a combination of consistent decisions associated with a specific author at different levels of language production, including lexical, syntactic, and structural. In this paper, we introduce a style-aware neural model to encode document information from three stylistic levels and evaluate it in the domain of authorship attribution. First, we propose a simple way to jointly encode syntactic and lexical representations of sentences. Subsequently, we employ an attention-based hierarchical neural network to encode the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences in documents while rewarding the sentences which contribute more to capturing the writing style. Our experimental results, based on four benchmark datasets, reveal the benefits of encoding document information from all three stylistic levels when compared to the baseline methods in the literature.
As Web traffics is increasing on the Internet, caching solutions for Web systems are becoming more important since they can greatly expand system scalability. An important part of a caching solution is cache replacement policy, which is responsible for selecting victim items that should be removed in order to make space for new objects. Typical replacement policies used in practice only take advantage of temporal reference locality by removing the least recently/frequently requested items from the cache. Although those policies work well in memory or filesystem cache, they are inefficient for Web systems since they do not exploit semantic relationship between Web items. This paper presents a semantic-aware caching policy that can be used in Web systems to enhance scalability. The proposed caching mechanism defines semantic distance from a web page to a set of pivot pages and use the semantic distances as a metric for choosing victims. Also, it use a function-based metric that combines access frequency and cache item size for tie-breaking. Our simulations show that out enhancements outperform traditional methods in terms of hit rate, which can be useful for websites with many small and similar-in-size web objects.
Comment spam is one of the great challenges faced by forum administrators. Detecting and blocking comment spam can relieve the load on servers, improve user experience and purify the network conditions. This paper focuses on the detection of comment spam. The behaviors of spammer and the content of spam were analyzed. According to analysis results, two types of effective features are extracted which can make a better description of spammer characteristics. Additionally, a gradient boosting tree algorithm was used to construct the comment spam detector based on the extracted features. Our proposed method is examined on a blog spam dataset which was published by previous research, and the result illustrates that our method performs better than the previous method on detection accuracy. Moreover, the CPU time is recorded to demonstrate that the time spent on both training and testing maintains a small value.
We are currently witnessing the development of increasingly effective author identification systems (AISs) that have the potential to track users across the internet based on their writing style. In this paper, we discuss two methods for providing user anonymity with respect to writing style: Adversarial Stylometry and Adversarial Authorship. With Adversarial Stylometry, a user attempts to obfuscate their writing style by consciously altering it. With Adversarial Authorship, a user can select an author cluster target (ACT) and write toward this target with the intention of subverting an AIS so that the user's writing sample will be misclassified Our results show that Adversarial Authorship via interactive evolutionary hill-climbing outperforms Adversarial Stylometry.
Due to the development of cloud computing and NoSQL database, more and more sensitive information are stored in NoSQL databases, which exposes quite a lot security vulnerabilities. This paper discusses security features of MongoDB database and proposes a transparent middleware implementation. The analysis of experiment results show that this transparent middleware can efficiently encrypt sensitive data specified by users on a dataset level. Existing application systems do not need too many modifications in order to apply this middleware.
The number of vulnerabilities and reported attacks on Web systems are showing increasing trends, which clearly illustrate the need for better understanding of malicious cyber activities. In this paper we use clustering to classify attacker activities aimed at Web systems. The empirical analysis is based on four datasets, each in duration of several months, collected by high-interaction honey pots. The results show that behavioral clustering analysis can be used to distinguish between attack sessions and vulnerability scan sessions. However, the performance heavily depends on the dataset. Furthermore, the results show that attacks differ from vulnerability scans in a small number of features (i.e., session characteristics). Specifically, for each dataset, the best feature selection method (in terms of the high probability of detection and low probability of false alarm) selects only three features and results into three to four clusters, significantly improving the performance of clustering compared to the case when all features are used. The best subset of features and the extent of the improvement, however, also depend on the dataset.
Internet security issues require authorship identification for all kinds of internet contents; however, authorship identification for microblog users is much harder than other documents because microblog texts are too short. Moreover, when the number of candidates becomes large, i.e., big data, it will take long time to identify. Our proposed method solves these problems. The experimental results show that our method successfully identifies the authorship with 53.2% of precision out of 10,000 microblog users in the almost half execution time of previous method.
Most web applications have critical bugs (faults) affecting their security, which makes them vulnerable to attacks by hackers and organized crime. To prevent these security problems from occurring it is of utmost importance to understand the typical software faults. This paper contributes to this body of knowledge by presenting a field study on two of the most widely spread and critical web application vulnerabilities: SQL Injection and XSS. It analyzes the source code of security patches of widely used web applications written in weak and strong typed languages. Results show that only a small subset of software fault types, affecting a restricted collection of statements, is related to security. To understand how these vulnerabilities are really exploited by hackers, this paper also presents an analysis of the source code of the scripts used to attack them. The outcomes of this study can be used to train software developers and code inspectors in the detection of such faults and are also the foundation for the research of realistic vulnerability and attack injectors that can be used to assess security mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, vulnerability scanners, and static code analyzers.