Phish Derby: Shoring the Human Shield Through Gamified Phishing Attacks

To better understand employees’ reporting behaviors in relation to phishing emails, we gamified the phishing security awareness training process by creating and conducting a month-long “Phish Derby” competition at a large university in the U.S. The university’s Information Security Office challenged employees to prove they could detect phishing emails as part of the simulated phishing program currently in place. Employees volunteered to compete for prizes during this special event and were instructed to report suspicious emails as potential phishing attacks. Prior to the beginning of the competition, we collected demographics and data related to the concepts central to two theoretical foundations: the Big Five personality traits and goal orientation theory. We found several notable relationships between demographic variables and Phish Derby performance, which was operationalized from the number of phishing attacks reported and employee report speed. Several key findings emerged, including past performance on simulated phishing campaigns positively predicted Phish Derby performance; older participants performed better than their younger colleagues, but more educated participants performed poorer; and individuals who used a mix of PCs and Macs at work performed worse than those using a single platform. We also found that two of the Big Five personality dimensions, extraversion and agreeableness, were both associated with poorer performance in phishing detection and reporting. Likewise, individuals who were driven to perform well in the Phish Derby because they desired to learn from the experience (i.e., learning goal orientation) performed at a lower level than those driven by other goals. Interestingly, self-reported levels of computer skill and the perceived ability to detect phishing messages failed to exhibit a significant relationship with Phish Derby performance. We discuss these findings and describe how focusing on motivating the good in employee cyber behaviors is a necessary yet too often overlooked component in organizations whose training cyber cultures are rooted in employee click rates alone.

Cyberweapons

This chapter explains tactical offensive cyberoperations to derive a precise definition of cyberweapons. The definition will be used to explore implementable options for cyber arms control and functional cyber norms, it will help to delineate important research gaps and red lines and to identify novel options for an application of international humanitarian law to strategic cyberwarfare, such as an application of the human shield rule to ban commercial information technology from military units.

Multi-agent based safety computational experiment system for shield tunneling projects

PurposeIn shield tunneling projects, human, shield machine and underground environment are tightly coupled and interacted. Accidents often occur under dysfunctional interactions among them. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a multi-agent based safety computational experiment system (SCES) and use it to identify the main influential factors of various aspects of human, shield machine and underground environment.Design/methodology/approachThe methods mainly comprised computational experiments and multi-agent technologies. First, a safety model with human-machine-environment interaction consideration is developed through the multi-agent technologies. On this basis, SCES is implemented. Then computational experiments are designed and performed on SCES for analyzing safety performance and identifying the main influential factors.FindingsThe main influential factors of two common accidents are identified. For surface settlement, the main influential factors are ranked as experience, soil density, soil cohesion, screw conveyor speed and thrust force in descending order of influence levels; for mud cake on cutter, they are ranked as soil cohesion, experience, cutter speed and screw conveyor speed. These results are consistent with intuition and previous studies and demonstrate the applicability of SCES.Practical implicationsThe proposed SCES provides comprehensive risk factor identification for shield tunneling projects and also insights to support informed decisions for safety management.Originality/valueA safety model with human-machine-environment interaction consideration is developed and computational experiments are used to analyze the safety performance. The novel method and model could contribute to system-based safety research and promote systematic understanding of the safety performance of shield tunneling projects.

Living in the concrete jungle: carnivore spatial ecology in urban parks

ABSTRACTPeople and wildlife are living in an increasingly urban world, replete with unprecedented human densities, sprawling built environments, and altered landscapes. Such anthropogenic pressures can affect multiple processes within an ecological community, from spatial patterns to interspecific interactions. We tested two competing hypotheses, human shields versus human competitors, to characterize how humans affect the carnivore community using multi-species occupancy models. From 2017-2020, we conducted the first camera survey of city parks in Detroit, Michigan, and collected spatial occurrence data of the local native carnivore community. Our 12,106-trap night survey captured detected data for coyotes (Canis latrans), red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), gray foxes (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), raccoons (Procyon lotor), and striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis). Overall occupancy varied across species (Ψcoyote=0.40, Ψ raccoon=0.54, Ψred fox =0.19, Ψstriped skunk =0.09). Contrary to expectations, humans did not significantly affect individual occupancy for these urban carnivores. However, co-occurrence between coyote and skunk only increased with human activity. The observed positive spatial association between an apex and subordinate pair supports the human shield hypothesis. Our findings demonstrate how urban carnivores can exploit spatial refugia and coexist with humans in the cityscape.

War against “Internal Enemies”: Dr. Franz Lucas's Sterilization of Sinti and Roma in Ravensbrück Men's Camp in January 1945

Following the passing of the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Genetic Diseases” in July 1933, sterilization became a means to tighten the borders of the German ethnic community against outsiders, including Sinti and Roma. For a while, Sinti soldiers were spared sterilization. After Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 1942, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They escaped the extermination of other Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerlager on the night of August 2, 1944, only because they represented a human shield deployable against advancing Russian troops. Still, the Reich insisted on sterilizing them and their families before placing them in front of enemy guns because they were still considered “internal enemies.” As a result, some forty Sinti men and boys were sterilized by Dr. Franz Lucas in the men's camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945. Focusing on their story challenges Lucas's portrayal as the victim of SS practices, a narrative that long benefitted from the testimony of non-Sinti prisoners. In addition, compensation agencies in Germany underestimated the ongoing effects of psychological trauma resulting from sterilization. Sinti victims who were subjected to an “expert assessment” of their blood purity before war's end underwent a renewed assessment of their productivity for German society after the war.