Biblio
Threat actors are constantly seeking new attack surfaces, with ransomeware being one the most successful attack vectors that have been used for financial gain. This has been achieved through the dispersion of unlimited polymorphic samples of ransomware whilst those responsible evade detection and hide their identity. Nonetheless, every ransomware threat actor adopts some similar style or uses some common patterns in their malicious code writing, which can be significant evidence contributing to their identification. he first step in attempting to identify the source of the attack is to cluster a large number of ransomware samples based on very little or no information about the samples, accordingly, their traits and signatures can be analysed and identified. T herefore, this paper proposes an efficient fuzzy analysis approach to cluster ransomware samples based on the combination of two fuzzy techniques fuzzy hashing and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering. Unlike other clustering techniques, FCM can directly utilise similarity scores generated by a fuzzy hashing method and cluster them into similar groups without requiring additional transformational steps to obtain distance among objects for clustering. Thus, it reduces the computational overheads by utilising fuzzy similarity scores obtained at the time of initial triaging of whether the sample is known or unknown ransomware. The performance of the proposed fuzzy method is compared against k-means clustering and the two fuzzy hashing methods SSDEEP and SDHASH which are evaluated based on their FCM clustering results to understand how the similarity score affects the clustering results.
Today's more reliable communication technology, together with the availability of higher computational power, have paved the way for introduction of more advanced automation systems based on distributed intelligence and multi-agent technology. However, abundance of data, while making these systems more powerful, can at the same time act as their biggest vulnerability. In a web of interconnected devices and components functioning within an automation framework, potential impact of malfunction in a single device, either through internal failure or external damage/intrusion, may lead to detrimental side-effects spread across the whole underlying system. The potentially large number of devices, along with their inherent interrelations and interdependencies, may hinder the ability of human operators to interpret events, identify their scope of impact and take remedial actions if necessary. Through utilization of the concepts of graph-theoretic fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) and expert systems, this paper puts forth a solution that is able to reveal weak links and vulnerabilities of an automation system, should it become exposed to partial internal failure or external damage. A case study has been performed on the IEEE 34-bus test distribution system to show the efficiency of the proposed scheme.