In the last two decades, the number of rapidly increasing cyber incidents (i.e., data theft and privacy breaches) shows that it is becoming enormously difficult for conventional defense mechanisms and architectures to neutralize modern cyber threats in a real-time situation. Disgruntled and rouge employees/agents and intrusive applications are two notorious classes of such modern threats, referred to as Insider Threats, which lead to data theft and privacy breaches. To counter such state-of-the-art threats, modern defense mechanisms require the incorporation of active threat analytics to proactively detect and mitigate any malicious intent at the employee or application level. Existing solutions to these problems intensively rely on co-relation, distance-based risk metrics, and human judgment. Especially when humans are kept in the loop for access-control policy-related decision-making against advanced persistent threats. As a consequence, the situation can escalate and lead to privacy/data breaches in case of insider threats. To confront such challenges, the security community has been striving to identify anomalous intent for advanced behavioral anomaly detection and auto-resiliency (the ability to deter an ongoing threat by policy tuning). Towards this dimension, we aim to review the literature in this domain and evaluate the effectiveness of existing approaches per our proposed criteria. According to our knowledge, this is one of the first endeavors toward developing evaluation-based standards to assess the effectiveness of relevant approaches in this domain while considering insider employees and intrusive applications simultaneously. There have been efforts in literature towards describing and understanding insider threats in general. However, none have addressed the detection and deterrence element in its entirety, hence making our contribution one of a kind. Towards the end of this article, we enlist and discuss the existing data sets. The data sets can help understand the attributes that play crucial roles in insider threat detection. In addition, they can be beneficial for testing the newly designed security solutions in this domain. We also present recommendations for establishing a baseline standard for analyzing insider-threat data sets. This baseline standard could be used in the future to design resilient architectures and provide a road map for organizations to enhance their defense capabilities against insider threats.

Coronaviruses are a well-established and deadly group of viruses that cause illness in both humans and animals. The novel type of this virus group, named COVID-19, was firstly reported in December 2019, and, with the passage of time, coronavirus has spread to almost all parts of the world. Coronavirus has been the cause of millions of deaths around the world. Furthermore, many countries are struggling with COVID-19 and have experimented with various kinds of vaccines to eliminate the deadly virus and its variants. This survey deals with COVID-19 data analysis and its impact on human social life. Data analysis and information related to coronavirus can greatly help scientists and governments in controlling the spread and symptoms of the deadly coronavirus. In this survey, we cover many areas of discussion related to COVID-19 data analysis, such as how artificial intelligence, along with machine learning, deep learning, and IoT, have worked together to fight against COVID-19. We also discuss artificial intelligence and IoT techniques used to forecast, detect, and diagnose patients of the novel coronavirus. Moreover, this survey also describes how fake news, doctored results, and conspiracy theories were spread over social media sites, such as Twitter, by applying various social network analysis and sentimental analysis techniques. A comprehensive comparative analysis of existing techniques has also been conducted. In the end, the Discussion section presents different data analysis techniques, provides future directions for research, and suggests general guidelines for handling coronavirus, as well as changing work and life conditions.

Insider threats refer to harmful actions carried out by authorized users within an organization, posing the most damaging risks. The increasing number of these threats has revealed the inadequacy of traditional methods for detecting and mitigating insider threats. These existing approaches lack the ability to analyze activity-related information in detail, resulting in delayed detection of malicious intent. Additionally, current methods lack advancements in addressing noisy datasets or unknown scenarios, leading to under-fitting or over-fitting of the models. To address these, our paper presents a hybrid insider threat detection framework. We not only enhance prediction accuracy by incorporating a layer of statistical criteria on top of machine learning-based classification but also present optimal parameters to address over/under-fitting of models. We evaluate the performance of our framework using a real-life threat test dataset (CERT r4.2) and compare it to existing methods on the same dataset (Glasser and Lindauer 2013). Our initial evaluation demonstrates that our proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 98.48% in detecting insider threats, surpassing the performance of most of the existing methods. Additionally, our framework effectively handles potential bias and data imbalance issues that can arise in real-life scenarios.

Third-party payment libraries (TPLs) are widely used in Android applications to facilitate in-app transactions, yet their security implications remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automated detection and security analysis of payment libraries in Android applications. Our tool, PayScan, employs byte-pattern analysis and heuristic scanning techniques to identify TPLs and then it assesses their security posture. Additionally, the tool integrates three independent security scanners. We analyzed a dataset of 10,553 Android applications, detecting 18 payment libraries and evaluating their security and privacy risks. Our findings indicate that 71.7% of applications use outdated payment libraries, with some SDK versions being over four years old. Additionally, we identified 397 private key leaks across 212 applications. The security scanners detected over 20,000 vulnerabilities, including critical issues such as SSL misconfigurations, WebView XSS, and weak cryptographic implementations. We compare our detection approach against LibScout and LibRadar, demonstrating its practical performance in detecting payment libraries, including in obfuscated applications. This study reveals important security risks in mobile payment ecosystems and emphasizes the value of continued monitoring of third-party payment libraries. The proposed tool offers a scalable solution for detection and analysis, providing practical utility for researchers, developers, and auditors focused on financial application security.