New Dutch government will prioritise higher spending

Significance His new government, which took a record 271 days to form, is a reiteration of the previous four-party coalition involving Rutte's centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the centrist liberals of Democrats 66 (D66) and two Christian democratic parties, the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the more conservative Christian Union (CU). The coalition deal promises a significant shift away from the austerity policies of previous governments. Impacts The collective rise of the far-right vote means the far right will continue to worry centrist parties and thus influence government policy. Higher structural spending in education should improve medium-to-long-term productivity development and output. The government promises to strengthen cyber capabilities in order to crack down on intellectual property theft.

Cybercrime dan Cybersecurity pada Fintech: Sebuah Tinjauan Pustaka Sistematis

This study is intended to determine the cybercrime challenges faced by the fintech industry as well as anticipatory actions in the form of cybersecurity to overcome these challenges. This study employs a systematic literature review method from various articles discussing cybercrime and cybersecurity in fintech that were published in reputable online databases. The findings indicate that cybercrime problems in fintech consist of cybercrime regulations that are not strict, data and information theft, and intellectual property theft in which impacting on the reputation of fintech. Cybersecurity as an attempt to tackle cybercrime in fintech can be performed through proactive action, strengthening regulations, and establishing a reliable cybersecurity framework or procedure. The implications of this research are as an additional reference for academics, practitioners, regulators, and fintech actors related to the fast pace development of cybercrime and cybersecurity in fintech. The limitation of this study is that it only provides an overview and elaborate the results of prior studies instead of provide a further analysis of the relationship between the articles discussed. Recommendations for further research are to increase the scope of the articles studied or apply other literature review methods or conduct empirical research to confirm the results of this study.

Intellectual Property Theft Protection in IoT Based Precision Agriculture Using SDN

In this work, we examine the privacy and safety issues of Internet of Things (IoT)-based Precision Agriculture (PA), which could lead to the problem that industry is currently experiencing as a result of Intellectual Property Theft (IPT). Increasing IoT-based information flow in PA will make a system less secure if a proper security mechanism is not ensured. Shortly, IoT will transform everyday lives with its applications. Intellectual Property (IP) is another important concept of an intelligent farming system. If the IP of a wise farming system leaks, it damages all intellectual ideas like cultivation patterns, plant variety rights, and IoT generated information of IoT-based PA. Thus, we proposed an IoT enabled SDN gateway regulatory system that ensures control of a foreign device without having access to sensitive farm information. Most of the farm uses its devices without the use of its integrated management and memory unit. An SDN-based structure to solve IP theft in precision farming has been proposed. In our proposed concept, a control system integrates with the cloud server, which is called the control hub. This hub will carry out the overall PA monitoring system. By hiring the farm devices in the agricultural system, these devices must be tailored according to our systems. Therefore, our proposed PA is a management system for all controllable inputs. The overall goal is to increase the probability of profit and reduce the likelihood of IPT. It does not only give more information but also improves information securely by enhancing the overall performance of PA. Our proposed PA architecture has been measured based on the throughput, round trip time, jitter, packet error rate, and the cumulative distribution function. Our achieved results reduced around (1.66–6.46)% compared to the previous research. In the future, blockchain will be integrated with this proposed architecture for further implementation.

Breaking CAS-Lock and Its Variants by Exploiting Structural Traces

Logic locking is a prominent solution to protect against design intellectual property theft. However, there has been a decade-long cat-and-mouse game between defenses and attacks. A turning point in logic locking was the development of miterbased Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attack that steered the research in the direction of developing SAT-resilient schemes. These schemes, however achieved SAT resilience at the cost of low output corruption. Recently, cascaded locking (CAS-Lock) [SXTF20a] was proposed that provides non-trivial output corruption all-the-while maintaining resilience to the SAT attack. Regardless of the theoretical properties, we revisit some of the assumptions made about its implementation, especially about security-unaware synthesis tools, and subsequently expose a set of structural vulnerabilities that can be exploited to break these schemes. We propose our attacks on baseline CAS-Lock as well as mirrored CAS (M-CAS), an improved version of CAS-Lock. We furnish extensive simulation results of our attacks on ISCAS’85 and ITC’99 benchmarks, where we show that CAS-Lock/M-CAS can be broken with ∼94% success rate. Further, we open-source all implementation scripts, locked circuits, and attack scripts for the community. Finally, we discuss the pitfalls of point function-based locking techniques including Anti-SAT [XS18] and Stripped Functionality Logic Locking(SFLL-HD) [YSN+17], which suffer from similar implementation issues.

Using Word Embeddings to Deter Intellectual Property Theft through Automated Generation of Fake Documents

Theft of intellectual property is a growing problem—one that is exacerbated by the fact that a successful compromise of an enterprise might only become known months after the hack. A recent solution called FORGE addresses this problem by automatically generating N “fake” versions of any real document so that the attacker has to determine which of the N + 1 documents that they have exfiltrated from a compromised network is real. In this article, we remove two major drawbacks in FORGE: (i) FORGE requires ontologies in order to generate fake documents—however, in the real world, ontologies, especially good ontologies, are infrequently available. The WE-FORGE system proposed in this article completely eliminates the need for ontologies by using distance metrics on word embeddings instead. (ii) FORGE generates fake documents by first identifying “target” concepts in the original document and then substituting “replacement” concepts for them. However, we will show that this can lead to sub-optimal results (e.g., as target concepts are selected without knowing the availability and/or quality of the replacement concepts, they can sometimes lead to poor results). Our WE-FORGE system addresses this problem in two possible ways by performing a joint optimization to select concepts and replacements simultaneously. We conduct a human study involving both computer science and chemistry documents and show that WE-FORGE successfully deceives adversaries.

A Blockchain-based G-code Protection Approach for Cyber-Physical Security in Additive Manufacturing

As an emerging technology, additive manufacturing (AM) is able to fabricate products with complex geometries using various materials. In particular, cyber-enabled AM systems have recently become widely applied in many real-world applications. It significantly improves the flexibility and productivity of AM but poses the system under high risks of cyber-physical attacks. For example, cyber-physical attack could maliciously tamper the product design and process parameters, which, in turn, leads to significant alteration of the desired properties in AM products. Therefore, there is an urgent need in incorporating advanced technologies to improve the cyber-physical security for the cyber-enabled AM systems. In this study, two common types of cyber-physical attacks regarding the G-code security were investigated, namely, unintended design modifications and intellectual property theft. To effectively secure the G-code against these two attacks, a new methodology is developed in this study, which consists of a novel blockchain-based data storage approach and an effective asymmetry encryption technique. The proposed method was also applied to a real-world AM case for ensuring the cyber-physical security of the face shield fabrication, which is critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the proposed methodology, malicious tampering can be accurately detected in a timely manner and meanwhile the risk of unauthorized access of the G-code file will be greatly eliminated as well.

Risk assessment of cyber-attacks on telemetry-enabled cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIED)

Cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIED) are vulnerable to radio frequency (RF) cyber-attacks. Besides, CIED communicate with medical equipment whose telemetry capabilities and IP connectivity are creating new entry points that may be used by attackers. Therefore, it remains crucial to perform a cybersecurity risk assessment of CIED and the systems they rely on to determine the gravity of threats, address the riskiest ones on a priority basis, and develop effective risk management plans. In this study, we carry out such risk assessment according to the ISO/IEC 27005 standard and the NIST SP 800-30 guide. We employed a threat-oriented analytical approach and divided the analysis into three parts, an actor-based analysis to determine the impact of the attacks, a scenario-based analysis to measure the probability of occurrence of threats, and a combined analysis to identify the riskiest attack outcomes. The results show that vulnerabilities on the RF interface of CIED represent an acceptable risk, whereas the network and Internet connectivity of the systems they rely on represent an important potential risk. Further analysis reveals that the damages of these cyber-attacks could spread further to affect manufacturers through intellectual property theft or physicians by affecting their reputation.

“Intellectual property theft by predatory publishers recruited in Academia can be facilitated through public engagement and spam emails”

Harassment in deprived areas is not uncommon, but it is never-ending.

Software Piracy in Nigeria

The enormity of software piracy varies in different countries and Nigeria is not an exception. Software piracy occurs in diverse forms such as soft lifting, hard disk loading, counterfeiting and unauthorized renting. Many reasons are behind software piracy. Software piracy has many negative economic consequences: Competition distorted by pirated software at the expense of local industries, loss of tax revenue and jobs because of the lack of a legitimate market, increase in cost recovery which, overall, affects social well-being of the citizenry. Findings have revealed that Nigeria has the highest case of software piracy, intellectual property theft and other sharp practices in the IT industry in Africa. Hence, this work investigates software piracy in Nigeria; revealing the concepts, causes, effects; and proffered solutions. We adopted the descriptive survey design. The research instrument used was online questionnaire with a sample size of 3270 people drawn from a population of respondents from the six (6) Geopolitical Zones of Nigeria. The results show that software piracy has statistically significant effect on the economy of Nigeria and that high standard of living is the biggest cause of software piracy in Nigeria.