Pharming Attack Designs

Author(s):  
Manish Gupta

Pharming is emerging as a major new Internet security threat. Pharming has overtaken “phishing” as the most dangerous Internet scam tactic, according to the latest Internet Security Intelligence Briefing (Veri-Sign, 2005). Pharming attacks exploit the design and implementation flaws in DNS services and the way Internet addresses are resolved to Internet protocol (IP) addresses. There are an estimated 7.5 million external DNS servers on the public Internet (MF-Survey, 2006). Pharming attacks manipulate components of the domain and host naming systems to redirect Internet entering personal and sensitive information on their fake site. Financial services’ sites are often the targets of these attacks, in which criminals try to acquire personal information in order to access bank accounts, steal identities, or commit other kinds of fraud. The use of faked Web sites makes pharming sound similar to e-mail phishing scams, but pharming is more insidious, since users are redirected to a false site without any participation or knowledge on their part. Pharming is technically harder to accomplish than phishing, but also sneakier because it can be done without any active mistake on the part of the victim (Violino, 2005). The greatest security threat lies in the fact that a successful pharming attack leaves no information on the user’s computer to indicate that anything is wrong.

Author(s):  
Roel During ◽  
Marcel Pleijte ◽  
Rosalie I. van Dam ◽  
Irini E. Salverda

Open data and citizen-led initiatives can be both friends and foes. Where it is available and ‘open', official data not only encourages increased public participation but can also generate the production and scrutiny of new material, potentially of benefit to the original provider and others, official or otherwise. In this way, official open data can be seen to improve democracy or, more accurately, the so-called ‘participative democracy'. On the other hand, the public is not always eager to share their personal information in the most open ways. Private and sometimes sensitive information however is required to initiate projects of societal benefit in difficult times. Many citizens appear content to channel personal information exchange via social media instead of putting it on public web sites. The perceived benefits from sharing and complete openness do not outweigh any disadvantages or fear of regulation. This is caused by various sources of contingency, such as the different appeals on citizens, construed in discourses on the participation society and the representative democracy, calling for social openness in the first and privacy protection in the latter. Moreover, the discourse on open data is an economic argument fighting the rules of privacy instead of the promotion of open data as one of the prerequisites for social action. Civil servants acknowledge that access to open data via all sorts of apps could contribute to the mushrooming of public initiatives, but are reluctant to release person-related sensitive information. The authors will describe and discuss this dilemma in the context of some recent case studies from the Netherlands concerning governmental programmes on open data and citizens' initiatives, to highlight both the governance constraints and uncertainties as well as citizens' concerns on data access and data sharing. It will be shown that openness has a different meaning and understanding in the participation society and representative democracy: i.e. the tension surrounding the sharing of private social information versus transparency. Looking from both sides at openness reveals double contingency: understanding and intentions on this openness invokes mutual enforcing uncertainties. This double contingency hampers citizens' eagerness to participate. The paper will conclude with a practical recommendation for improving data governance.


Author(s):  
Thomas M. Chen

The founding of the Bell Telephone System, the public switched telephone network (PSTN), has evolved into a highly successful global telecommunications system. It is designed specifically for voice communications, and provides a high quality of service and ease of use. It is supported by sophisticated operations systems that ensure extremely high dependability and availability. Over the past 100 years, it has been a showcase for communications engineering and led to groundbreaking new technologies (e.g., transistors, fiber optics). Yet it is remarkable that many public carriers see their future in Internet protocol (IP) networks, namely the Internet. Of course, the Internet has also been highly successful, coinciding with the proliferation of personal computers. It has become ubiquitous for data applications such as the World Wide Web, e-mail, and peer-to-peer file sharing. While it is not surprising that the Internet is the future for data services, even voice services are transitioning to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). This phenomenon bears closer examination, as a prime example explaining the success of the Internet as a universal communications platform. This chapter gives a historical development of the Internet and an overview of technical and nontechnical reasons for the convergence of services.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (02) ◽  
pp. 231-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen J. Shogan

From the establishment of the United States Postal Service and the invention of the telegram, to the introduction of C-SPAN and the explosion of the Internet, the development of new communication technologies has always affected the functioning of Congress. Not surprisingly, recent innovations such as e-mail and social networking have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution, and rethink the manner in which it engages the public. In this brief examination, I discuss recent changes in congressional behavior and practices due to technological innovation, specifically the proliferation of social networking Web sites. Then, I cautiously predict future trends in the use of social networking and related technologies as they become more integrated in congressional offices and increase the capacity for more robust internal and constituent communications over time.


Author(s):  
Xin Luo ◽  
Merrill Warkentin

The continuous evolution of information security threats, coupled with increasing sophistication of malicious codes and the greater flexibility in working practices demanded by organizations and individual users, have imposed further burdens on the development of effective anti-malware defenses. Despite the fact that the IT community is endeavoring to prevent and thwart security threats, the Internet is perceived as the medium that transmits not only legitimate information but also malicious codes. In this cat-and-mouse predicament, it is widely acknowledged that, as new security countermeasures arise, malware authors are always able to learn how to manipulate the loopholes or vulnerabilities of these technologies, and can thereby weaponize new streams of malicious attacks. From e-mail attachments embedded with Trojan horses to recent advanced malware attacks such as Gozi programs, which compromise and transmit users’ highly sensitive information in a clandestine way, malware continues to evolve to be increasingly surreptitious and deadly. This trend of malware development seems foreseeable, yet making it increasingly arduous for organizations and/or individuals to detect and remove malicious codes and to defend against profit-driven perpetrators in the cyber world. This article introduces new malware threats such as ransomware, spyware, and rootkits, discusses the trends of malware development, and provides analysis for malware defenses. Keywords: Ransomware, Spyware, Anti-Virus, Malware, Malicious Code, Background Various forms of malware have been a part of the computing environment since before the implementation of the public Internet. However, the Internet’s ubiquity has ushered in an explosion in the severity and complexity of various forms of malicious applications delivered via increasingly ingenious methods. The original malware attacks were perpetrated via e-mail attachments, but new vulnerabilities have been identified and exploited by a variety of perpetrators who range from merely curious hackers to sophisticated organized criminals and identify thieves. In an earlier manuscript (Luo & Warkentin, 2005), the authors established the basic taxonomy of malware that included various types of computer viruses (boot sector viruses, macro viruses, etc.), worms, and Trojan horses. Since that time, numerous new forms of malicious code have been found “in the wild.”


2020 ◽  
pp. 1469-1487
Author(s):  
Roel During ◽  
Marcel Pleijte ◽  
Rosalie I. van Dam ◽  
Irini E. Salverda

Open data and citizen-led initiatives can be both friends and foes. Where it is available and ‘open', official data not only encourages increased public participation but can also generate the production and scrutiny of new material, potentially of benefit to the original provider and others, official or otherwise. In this way, official open data can be seen to improve democracy or, more accurately, the so-called ‘participative democracy'. On the other hand, the public is not always eager to share their personal information in the most open ways. Private and sometimes sensitive information however is required to initiate projects of societal benefit in difficult times. Many citizens appear content to channel personal information exchange via social media instead of putting it on public web sites. The perceived benefits from sharing and complete openness do not outweigh any disadvantages or fear of regulation. This is caused by various sources of contingency, such as the different appeals on citizens, construed in discourses on the participation society and the representative democracy, calling for social openness in the first and privacy protection in the latter. Moreover, the discourse on open data is an economic argument fighting the rules of privacy instead of the promotion of open data as one of the prerequisites for social action. Civil servants acknowledge that access to open data via all sorts of apps could contribute to the mushrooming of public initiatives, but are reluctant to release person-related sensitive information. The authors will describe and discuss this dilemma in the context of some recent case studies from the Netherlands concerning governmental programmes on open data and citizens' initiatives, to highlight both the governance constraints and uncertainties as well as citizens' concerns on data access and data sharing. It will be shown that openness has a different meaning and understanding in the participation society and representative democracy: i.e. the tension surrounding the sharing of private social information versus transparency. Looking from both sides at openness reveals double contingency: understanding and intentions on this openness invokes mutual enforcing uncertainties. This double contingency hampers citizens' eagerness to participate. The paper will conclude with a practical recommendation for improving data governance.


Author(s):  
Barbara Carminati ◽  
Elena Ferrari ◽  
Andrea Perego

The wide diffusion and usage of social networking Web sites in the last years have made publicly available a huge amount of possible sensitive information, which can be used by third-parties with purposes different from the ones of the owners of such information. Currently, this issue has been addressed by enforcing into Web-based Social Networks (WBSNs) very simple protection mechanisms, or by using anonymization techniques, thanks to which it is possible to hide the identity of WBSN members while performing analysis on social network data. However, we believe that further solutions are needed, to allow WBSN members themselves to decide who can access their personal information and resources. To cope with this issue, in this chapter we illustrate a decentralized security framework for WBSNs, which provide both access control and privacy protection mechanisms. In our system, WBSN members can denote who is authorized to access the resources they publish and the relationships they participate in, in terms of the type, depth, and trust level of the relationships existing between members of a WBSN. Cryptographic techniques are then used to provide a controlled sharing of resources while preserving relationship privacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-43
Author(s):  
Graham McDonald

More than a hundred countries implement freedom of information laws. In the UK, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 [1] (FOIA) states that the government's documents must be made freely available, or opened , to the public. Moreover, all central UK government departments' documents that have a historic value must be transferred to the The National Archives (TNA) within twenty years of the document's creation. However, government documents can contain sensitive information, such as personal information or information that would likely damage international relations if it was opened. Therefore, all government documents that are to be publicly archived must be sensitivity reviewed to identify and redact the sensitive information. However, the lack of structure in digital document collections and the volume of digital documents that are to be sensitivity reviewed mean that the traditional manual sensitivity review process is not practical for digital sensitivity review. In this thesis, we argue that sensitivity classification can be deployed to assist government departments and human reviewers to sensitivity review born-digital government documents. However, classifying sensitive information is a complex task, since sensitivity is context-dependent and can require a human to judge on the likely effect of releasing the information into the public domain. Moreover, sensitivity is not necessarily topic-oriented, i.e., it is usually dependent on a combination of what is being said and about whom. Through a thorough empirical evaluation, we show that a text classification approach is effective for sensitivity classification and can be improved by identifying the vocabulary, syntactic and semantic document features that are reliable indicators of sensitive or nonsensitive text [2]. Furthermore, we propose to reduce the number of documents that have to be reviewed to learn an effective sensitivity classifier through an active learning strategy in which a sensitivity reviewer redacts any sensitive text in a document as they review it, to construct a representation of the sensitivities in a collection [3]. With this in mind, we propose a novel framework for technology-assisted sensitivity review that can prioritise the most appropriate documents to be reviewed at specific stages of the sensitivity review process. Furthermore, our framework can provide the reviewers with useful information to assist them in making their reviewing decisions. We conduct two user studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed framework for assisting with two distinct digital sensitivity review scenarios, or user models. Firstly, in the limited review user model, which addresses a scenario in which there are insufficient reviewing resources available to sensitivity review all of the documents in a collection, we show that our proposed framework can increase the number of documents that can be reviewed and released to the public with the available reviewing resources [4]. Secondly, in the exhaustive review user model, which addresses a scenario in which all of the documents in a collection will be manually sensitivity reviewed, we show that providing the reviewers with useful information about the documents that contain sensitive information can increase the reviewers' accuracy, reviewing speed and agreement [5]. This is the first thesis to investigate automatically classifying FOIA sensitive information to assist digital sensitivity review. The central contributions are our proposed framework for technology-assisted sensitivity review and our sensitivity classification approaches. Our contributions are validated using a collection of government documents that are sensitivity reviewed by expert sensitivity reviewers to identify two FOIA sensitivities, namely international relations and personal information. Our results demonstrate that our proposed framework is a viable technology for assisting digital sensitivity review. Supervisors Prof. Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow), Dr. Craig Macdonald (University of Glasgow) Available from: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/41076


Author(s):  
V. Kostiuk ◽  
Yu. Kostiuk ◽  
O. Usmanova

<div><p class="1"><em>The article’s research used the analysis scientific-sources base on a select question, web-sites of the stations (media concern TAVR Media and Internet-station </em><em>SKOVORODA), monitoring.</em></p></div><p><em>Broadcast relieve some periods of improvement, evolution and development, based on it’s features. One of the progress’ reason is technology development connected with radio. The end of last century and twenty years of current one characterise by universalism and convergence, that let media, beyond broadcast, had got the characteristics it never had before: watch the radio, fast connection between audience representers, communication with station’s journalists.</em></p><p><em>It made some influence and changes on the principles of formatting and functioning journalists professions at the radio. First, media concerns started to appeared, which have some stations in their structure, that have same top managers, almost similar department, close principles of airing. Second, Internet-stations let their audience the possibility to observe the air.</em></p><p><em>During the research, we defined, the administration of TAVR Media has the managers on each direction: manager of radio group, financial manager, commercial one (responsible for the sale), marketing director, (pr and image), general producer (manage musician direction), the station’s director.</em></p><p><em>Today, station has to work in active way and communicate with their audience, using messengers, profiles in social media. As a result, radio stations have in their arsenal person or group of persons which responsible for that activity. For example, web-radio SKOVORODA has a man, who manage </em><em><br /> </em><em>IT-work. Main duties of him: work with social medias, site content, deal with e-mail. Station’s of</em><em> </em><em>TAVR Media group (Melodiya FM, Relax, Radio Rocks, Russkoye Radio v Ukrayini, KISS FM, ХІТ FM) also have representers of modern professions: the head of digital department, traffic manager, system admin, etc.</em></p><p><em>Comparative analysis of the professions at radio, which include in the concern TAVR Media and web-station SKOVORODA did in the articleIn.</em></p><p><em>The research results can be used during the further study of radio journalism, teaching of one’s subject during the process of study students at faculture journalism, business media, management, etc.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> fm-broadcast, web-radio, journalist professions, media concern, radio presenter.</em><em></em></p>


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