The amount of fraud on the Internet is increasing along with the availability and the popularity of the Internet around the world. One of the most common forms of Internet fraud is phishing. Phishing attacks seek to obtain a user’s personal or secret information. The variety of phishing attacks is very broad, and usage of novel, more sophisticated methods complicates its automated filtering. Therefore, it is important to form up-to-date and detailed phishing attack taxonomy, which could be used for both human education purposes as well as phishing attack discrete notation. In this paper, we propose an e-mail-based phishing attack taxonomy, which includes six phases of the attack. Each phase has at least one criterion for the attack categorization. Each category is described, and in some cases the categories have sub-classes to present the full variety of phishing attacks. The proposed taxonomy is compared to similar taxonomies. Our taxonomy outperforms other phishing attack taxonomies in numbers of phases, criteria and distinguished classes. Validation of the proposed taxonomy is achieved by adapting it as a phishing attack notation for an incident management system. Taxonomy usage for phishing attack notation increases the level of description of phishing attacks compared to free-form phishing attack descriptions.
Financial area analysis is not limited to enterprise performance analysis. It is worth analyzing as wide an area as possible to obtain the full impression of a specific enterprise. News website content is a datum source that expresses the public’s opinion on enterprise operations, status, etc. Therefore, it is worth analyzing the news portal article text. Sentiment analysis in English texts and financial area texts exist, and are accurate, the complexity of Lithuanian language is mostly concentrated on sentiment analysis of comment texts, and does not provide high accuracy. Therefore in this paper, the supervised machine learning model was implemented to assign sentiment analysis on financial context news, gathered from Lithuanian language websites. The analysis was made using three commonly used classification algorithms in the field of sentiment analysis. The hyperparameters optimization using the grid search was performed to discover the best parameters of each classifier. All experimental investigations were made using the newly collected datasets from four Lithuanian news websites. The results of the applied machine learning algorithms show that the highest accuracy is obtained using a non-balanced dataset, via the multinomial Naive Bayes algorithm (71.1%). The other algorithm accuracies were slightly lower: a long short-term memory (71%), and a support vector machine (70.4%).
Spamming and phishing are two types of emailing that are annoying and unwanted, differing by the potential threat and impact to the user. Automated classification of these categories can increase the users’ awareness as well as to be used for incident investigation prioritization or automated fact gathering. However, currently there are no scientific papers focusing on email classification concerning these two categories of spam and phishing emails. Therefore this paper presents a solution, based on email message body text automated classification into spam and phishing emails. We apply the proposed solution for email classification, written in three languages: English, Russian, and Lithuanian. As most public email datasets almost exclusively collect English emails, we investigate the suitability of automated dataset translation to adapt it to email classification, written in other languages. Experiments on public dataset usage limitations for a specific organization are executed in this paper to evaluate the need of dataset updates for more accurate classification results.
11 November 2013 in International Journal of Computers Communications & Control
Adoption of security standards has the capability of improving the security level in an organization as well as to provide additional benefits and possibilities to the organization. However mapping of used standards has to be done when more than one security standard is employed in order to prevent redundant activities, not optimal resource management and unnecessary outlays. Employment of security ontology to map different standards can reduce the mapping complexity however the choice of security ontology is of high importance and there are no analyses on security ontology suitability for adaptive standards mapping. In this paper we analyze existing security ontologies by comparing their general properties, OntoMetric factors and ability to cover different security standards. As none of the analysed security ontologies were able to cover more than 1/3 of security standards, we proposed a new security ontology, which increased coverage of security standards compared to the existing ontologies and has a better branching and depth properties for ontology visualization purposes. During this research we mapped 4 security standards (ISO 27001, PCI DSS, ISSA 5173 and NISTIR 7621) to the new security ontology, therefore this ontology and mapping data can be used for adaptive mapping of any set of these security standards to optimize usage of multiple securitystandards in an organization.
In an information-security-assurance system, humans are usually the weakest link. It is partly related to insufficient cybersecurity knowledge and the ignorance of standard security recommendations. Consequently, the required password-strength requirements in information systems are the minimum of what can be done to ensure system security. Therefore, it is important to use up-to-date and context-sensitive password-strength-estimation systems. However, minor languages are ignored, and password strength is usually estimated using English-only dictionaries. To change the situation, a machine learning approach was proposed in this article to support a more realistic model to estimate the strength of Lithuanian user passwords. A newly compiled dataset of password strength was produced. It integrated both international- and Lithuanian-language-specific passwords, including 6 commonly used password features and 36 similarity metrics for each item (4 similarity metrics for 9 different dictionaries). The proposed solution predicts the password strength of five classes with 77% accuracy. Taking into account the complexity of the accuracy of the Lithuanian language, the achieved result is adequate, as the availability of intelligent Lithuanian-language-specific password-cracking tools is not widely available yet.
The increase in flying time of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is a relevant and difficult task for UAV designers. It is especially important in such tasks as monitoring, mapping, or signal retranslation. While the majority of research is concentrated on increasing the battery capacity, it is also important to utilize natural renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, thermals, etc. This article proposed a method for the automatic recognition of cumuliform clouds. Practical application of this method allows diverting of an unmanned aerial vehicle towards the identified cumuliform cloud and improving its probability of flying into a thermal flow, thus increasing the flight time of the UAV, as is performed by glider and paraglider pilots. The proposed method is based on the application of Hough transform and Canny edge detector methods, which have not been used for such a task before. For testing the proposed method a dataset of different clouds was generated and marked by experts. The achieved average accuracy of 87% on the unbalanced dataset demonstrates the practical applicability of the proposed method for detecting thermals related to cumuliform clouds. The article also provides the concept of VilniusTech developed UAV, implementing the proposed method.