Biblio

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.

Cultivation of Smart Grid refurbish with brisk and ingenious. The delinquent breed and sow mutilate in massive. This state of affair coerces security as a sapling which incessantly is to be irrigated with Research and Analysis. The Cyber Security is endowed with resiliency to the SYN flooding induced Denial of Service attack in this work. The proposed secure web server algorithm embedded in the LPC1768 processor ensures the smart resources to be precluded from the attack.

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, have become a key enabler for government organisations, businesses and individuals. With increasing growth in the adoption and use of ICT devices such as smart phones, personal computers and the Internet, Cybersecurity is one of the key concerns facing modern organisations in both developed and developing countries. This paper presents an overview of cybersecurity challenges in Bhutan, within the context that the nation is emerging as an ICT developing country. This study examines the cybersecurity incidents reported both in national media and government reports, identification and analysis of different types of cyber threats, understanding of the characteristics and motives behind cyber-attacks, and their frequency of occurrence since 1999. A discussion on an ongoing research study to investigate cybersecurity management and practices for Bhutan's government organisations is also highlighted.

The explosive growth of IT infrastructures, cloud systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) have resulted in complex systems that are extremely difficult to secure and protect against cyberattacks that are growing exponentially in the complexity and also in the number. Overcoming the cybersecurity challenges require cybersecurity environments supporting the development of innovative cybersecurity algorithms and evaluation of the experiments. In this paper, we present the design, analysis, and evaluation of the Cybersecurity Lab as a Service (CLaaS) which offers virtual cybersecurity experiments as a cloud service that can be accessed from anywhere and from any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, smart mobile device, etc.) with Internet connectivity. We exploit cloud computing systems and virtualization technologies to provide isolated and virtual cybersecurity experiments for vulnerability exploitation, launching cyberattacks, how cyber resources and services can be hardened, etc. We also present our performance evaluation and effectiveness of CLaaS experiments used by students.

The initiative to protect against future cyber crimes requires a collaborative effort from all types of agencies spanning industry, academia, federal institutions, and military agencies. Therefore, a Cybersecurity Information Exchange (CYBEX) framework is required to facilitate breach/patch related information sharing among the participants (firms) to combat cyber attacks. In this paper, we formulate a non-cooperative cybersecurity information sharing game that can guide: (i) the firms (players)1 to independently decide whether to “participate in CYBEX and share” or not; (ii) the CYBEX framework to utilize the participation cost dynamically as incentive (to attract firms toward self-enforced sharing) and as a charge (to increase revenue). We analyze the game from an evolutionary game-theoretic strategy and determine the conditions under which the players' self-enforced evolutionary stability can be achieved. We present a distributed learning heuristic to attain the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) under various conditions. We also show how CYBEX can wisely vary its pricing for participation to increase sharing as well as its own revenue, eventually evolving toward a win-win situation.

Workarounds to computer access in healthcare are sufficiently common that they often go unnoticed. Clinicians focus on patient care, not cybersecurity. We argue and demonstrate that understanding workarounds to healthcare workers’ computer access requires not only analyses of computer rules, but also interviews and observations with clinicians. In addition, we illustrate the value of shadowing clinicians and conducing focus groups to understand their motivations and tradeoffs for circumvention. Ethnographic investigation of the medical workplace emerges as a critical method of research because in the inevitable conflict between even well-intended people versus the machines, it’s the people who are the more creative, flexible, and motivated. We conducted interviews and observations with hundreds of medical workers and with 19 cybersecurity experts, CIOs, CMIOs, CTO, and IT workers to obtain their perceptions of computer security. We also shadowed clinicians as they worked. We present dozens of ways workers ingeniously circumvent security rules. The clinicians we studied were not “black hat” hackers, but just professionals seeking to accomplish their work despite the security technologies and regulations.
 

Workarounds to computer access in healthcare are sufficiently common that they often go unnoticed. Clinicians focus on patient care, not cybersecurity. We argue and demonstrate that understanding workarounds to healthcare workers’ computer access requires not only analyses of computer rules, but also interviews and observations with clinicians. In addition, we illustrate the value of shadowing clinicians and conducing focus groups to understand their motivations and tradeoffs for circumvention. Ethnographic investigation of the medical workplace emerges as a critical method of research because in the inevitable conflict between even well-intended people versus the machines, it’s the people who are the more creative, flexible, and motivated. We conducted interviews and observations with hundreds of medical workers and with 19 cybersecurity experts, CIOs, CMIOs, CTO, and IT workers to obtain their perceptions of computer security. We also shadowed clinicians as they worked. We present dozens of ways workers ingeniously circumvent security rules. The clinicians we studied were not “black hat” hackers, but just professionals seeking to accomplish their work despite the security technologies and regulations.

Educators and sponsors endorse competitions as a strong, positive influence on career choice. However, empirical studies of cybersecurity competitions are lacking, and evidence from computer science and mathematics competitions has been mixed. Here we report initial results from an ongoing study of the National Cyber League to provide a glimpse of the role of competitions in fostering cybersecurity career engagement. Preliminary results suggest that cyber competitions attract experienced individuals who will remain in the profession for the long-term, but future research is needed to understand how cyber competitions may engage women and those new to the field.

Cloud computing has become an attractive paradigm for many organizations in government, industry as well as academia. In academia, the cloud can offer instructors and students (whether local or at a distance) on-demand, dedicated, isolated, unlimited, and easily configurable machines. Such an approach has clear advantages over access to machines in a classic lab setting. In this paper, we show how cloud services and infrastructure could be harnessed to facilitate practical experience and training for cybersecurity. We used the popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud; however, the use cases and approaches laid out in this paper are also applicable to other cloud providers.

Nowhere is the problem of lack of human capital more keenly felt than in the field of cybersecurity where the numbers and quality of well-trained graduates are woefully lacking [10]. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences indicted the US education system as the culprit contributing to deficiencies in our technical workforce, sounding the alarm that we are at risk of losing our competitive edge [14]. While the government has made cybersecurity education a national priority, seeking to stimulate university and community college production of information assurance (IA) expertise, they still have thousands of IA jobs going unfilled. The big question for the last decade [17] has been 'where will we find the talent we need?' In this article, we describe one university's approach to begin addressing this problem and discuss an innovative curricular model that holistically develops future cybersecurity professionals.

Smart government is possible only if the security of sensitive data can be assured. The more knowledgeable government officials and citizens are about cybersecurity, the better are the chances that government data is not compromised or abused. In this paper, we present two systems under development that aim at improving cybersecurity education. First, we are creating a taxonomy of cybersecurity topics that provides links to relevant educational or research material. Second, we are building a portal that serves as platform for users to discuss the security of websites. These sources can be linked together. This helps to strengthen the knowledge of government officials and citizens with regard to cybersecurity issues. These issues are a central concern for open government initiatives.

In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell describes the 10,000-Hour Rule, a key to success in any field, as simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years [10]. Ongoing changes in technology and national security needs require aspiring excellent cybersecurity professionals to set a goal of 10,000 hours of relevant, hands-on skill development. The education system today is ill prepared to meet the challenge of producing an adequate number of cybersecurity professionals, but programs that use competitions and learning environments that teach depth are filling this void.

Wide-area monitoring and control (WAMC) systems are the next-generation operational-management systems for electric power systems. The main purpose of such systems is to provide high resolution real-time situational awareness in order to improve the operation of the power system by detecting and responding to fast evolving phenomenon in power systems. From an information and communication technology (ICT) perspective, the nonfunctional qualities of these systems are increasingly becoming important and there is a need to evaluate and analyze the factors that impact these nonfunctional qualities. Enterprise architecture methods, which capture properties of ICT systems in architecture models and use these models as a basis for analysis and decision making, are a promising approach to meet these challenges. This paper presents a quantitative architecture analysis method for the study of WAMC ICT architectures focusing primarily on the interoperability and cybersecurity aspects.
 

Many common cyberdefenses (like firewalls and intrusion-detection systems) are static, giving attackers the freedom to probe them at will. Moving-target defense (MTD) adds dynamism, putting the systems to be defended in motion, potentially at great cost to the defender. An alternative approach is a mobile resilient defense that removes attackers' ability to rely on prior experience without requiring motion in the protected infrastructure. The defensive technology absorbs most of the cost of motion, is resilient to attack, and is unpredictable to attackers. The authors' mobile resilient defense, Ant-Based Cyber Defense (ABCD), is a set of roaming, bio-inspired, digital-ant agents working with stationary agents in a hierarchy headed by a human supervisor. ABCD provides a resilient, extensible, and flexible defense that can scale to large, multi-enterprise infrastructures such as the smart electric grid.

The increased interconnectivity and complexity of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in power system networks has exposed the systems to a multitude of potential vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a novel approach for a next-generation SCADA-specific intrusion detection system (IDS). The proposed system analyzes multiple attributes in order to provide a comprehensive solution that is able to mitigate varied cyber-attack threats. The multiattribute IDS comprises a heterogeneous white list and behavior-based concept in order to make SCADA cybersystems more secure. This paper also proposes a multilayer cyber-security framework based on IDS for protecting SCADA cybersecurity in smart grids without compromising the availability of normal data. In addition, this paper presents a SCADA-specific cybersecurity testbed to investigate simulated attacks, which has been used in this paper to validate the proposed approach.

Modern power systems heavily rely on the associated cyber network, and cyber attacks against the control network may cause undesired consequences such as load shedding, equipment damage, and so forth. The behaviors of the attackers can be random, thus it is crucial to develop novel methods to evaluate the adequacy of the power system under probabilistic cyber attacks. In this study, the external and internal cyber structures of the substation are introduced, and possible attack paths against the breakers are analyzed. The attack resources and vulnerability factors of the cyber network are discussed considering their impacts on the success probability of a cyber attack. A procedure integrating the reliability of physical components and the impact of cyber attacks against breakers are proposed considering the behaviors of the physical devices and attackers. Simulations are conducted based on the IEEE RTS79 system. The impact of the attack resources and attack attempt numbers are analyzed for attackers from different threats groups. It is concluded that implementing effective cyber security measures is crucial to the cyber-physical power grids.

The InViz tool is a functional prototype that provides graphical visualizations of log file events to support real-time attack investigation. Through visualization, both experts and novices in cybersecurity can analyze patterns of application behavior and investigate potential cybersecurity attacks. The goal of this research is to identify and evaluate the cybersecurity information to visualize that reduces the amount of time required to perform cyber forensics.

We argue that emergent behavior is inherent to cybersecurity.