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It was found when reviewing the ransomware detection research literature that almost no proposal provided enough detail on how the test data set was created, or sufficient description of its actual content, to allow it to be recreated by other researchers interested in reconstructing their environment and validating the research results. A modern cybersecurity mixed file data set called NapierOne is presented, primarily aimed at, but not limited to, ransomware detection and forensic analysis research. NapierOne was designed to address this deficiency in reproducibility and improve consistency by facilitating research replication and repeatability. The methodology used in the creation of this data set is also described in detail. The data set was inspired by the Govdocs1 data set and it is intended that NapierOne be used as a complement to this original data set.An investigation was performed with the goal of determining the common files types currently in use. No specific research was found that explicitly provided this information, so an alternative consensus approach was employed. This involved combining the findings from multiple sources of file type usage into an overall ranked list. After which 5000 real-world example files were gathered, and a specific data subset created, for each of the common file types identified. In some circumstances, multiple data subsets were created for a specific file type, each subset representing a specific characteristic for that file type. For example, there are multiple data subsets for the ZIP file type with each subset containing examples of a specific compression method. Ransomware execution tends to produce files that have high entropy, so examples of file types that naturally have this attribute are also present. The resulting entire data set comprises of nearly 100 separate data subsets divided between 44 distinct file types, resulting in almost 500,000 unique files in total. A description of the techniques used to gather the files for each file type is provided together with the actions that were performed on the files to confirm that they were of the highest quality and provided an accurate representation of their specific file type. Details are also provided on the content of the entire data set as well as instructions on how researchers can gain free and unlimited access to the final data set.While the data set was initially created to aid research in ransomware detection, it is sufficiently broad and diverse enough to allow for its application in many other areas of research that require a varied mixture of common real-world file examples. The NapierOne data set is an ongoing project and researchers are strongly encouraged to leverage this data set in their own research.

A large number of smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) environments communicate via different messaging protocols. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a widely used publish–subscribe-based protocol for the communication of sensor or event data. The publish–subscribe strategy makes it more attractive for intruders and thus increases the number of possible attacks over MQTT. In this paper, we proposed a Deep Neural Network (DNN) for intrusion detection in the MQTT-based protocol and also compared its performance with other traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as a Naive Bayes (NB), Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Decision Tree (DT), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). The performance is proved using two different publicly available datasets, including (1) MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 and (2) a dataset with three different types of attacks, such as Man in the Middle (MitM), Intrusion in the network, and Denial of Services (DoS). The MQTT-IoT-IDS2020 contains three abstract-level features, including Uni-Flow, Bi-Flow, and Packet-Flow. The results for the first dataset and binary classification show that the DNN-based model achieved 99.92%, 99.75%, and 94.94% accuracies for Uni-flow, Bi-flow, and Packet-flow, respectively. However, in the case of multi-label classification, these accuracies reduced to 97.08%, 98.12%, and 90.79%, respectively. On the other hand, the proposed DNN model attains the highest accuracy of 97.13% against LSTM and GRUs for the second dataset.

One major problem with cyberbullying research is the lack of data, since researchers are traditionally forced to rely on survey data where victims and perpetrators self-report their impressions. In this paper, an automatic data collection system is presented that continuously collects in-game chat data from one of the most popular online multi-player games: World of Tanks. The data was collected and combined with other information about the players from available online data services. It presents a scoring scheme to enable identification of cyberbullying based on current research. Classification of the collected data was carried out using simple feature detection with SQL database queries and compared to classification from AI-based sentiment text analysis services that have recently become available and further against manually classified data using a custom-built classificationclient built for this paper. The simple SQL classification proved to be quite useful at identifying some features of toxic chat such as the use of bad language or racist sentiments, however the classification by the more sophisticated online sentiment analysis services proved to be disappointing. The results were then examined for insights into cyberbullying within this game and it was shown that it should be possible to reduce cyberbullying within the World of Tanks game by a significant factor by simply freezing the player’s ability to communicate through the in-game chat function for a short period after the player is killed within a match. It was also shown that very new players are much less likely to engage in cyberbullying, suggesting that it may be a learned behaviour from other players.

The paper introduces an approach to privacy enhancing technologies that sees privacy not merely as an individual right, but as a public good. This understanding of privacy has recently gained ground in the debate on appropriate legal protection for privacy in an online environment. The jurisprudential idea that privacy is a public good and prerequisite for a functioning democracy also entails that its protection should not be left exclusively to the individual whose privacy is infringed. This idea finds its correspondence in our approach to privacy protection through obfuscation, where everybody in a group takes a small privacy risk to protect the anonymity of fellow group members. We show how these ideas can be computationally realised in an Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP). IDAP is an efficient symmetric Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence.

Investigators define invasion of privacy during their operations as collateral damage. Inquiries that require gathering data about potential suspects from third parties, such as banks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or employers are likely to impact the relation between the data subject and the data controller. In this research a novel privacy-preserving approach to mitigating collateral damage during the acquisition process is presented and Investigative Data Acquisition Platform (IDAP) is defined. IDAP is an efficient symmetric Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol optimised for the specific purpose of facilitating public authorities’ enquiries for evidence. This research introduces a semi-trusted proxy into the PIR process in order to gain the acceptance of the general public for the trap-door based privacy-preserving techniques. Then the dilution factor is defined as a level of anonymity required in a given investigation. Defining this factor allows restricting the number of records processed, and therefore, minimising the processing time while maintaining an appropriate level of privacy. Finally, the technique allowing retrieval of records matching multiple selection criteria is described.

The aim of this paper is to provide profiles for crimes which can be used to model the context for information sharing between the police and community partner organisations. This context can then be integrated with information-sharing syntax used by Single Point of Contact (SPoC) agents to process information sharing requests [1]. The questionnaires attempt to clas-sify crimes into categories, with identify profiles of crime-types, according to the level of in-formation sharing they necessitate between community partner organisations. Crimes are sepa-rated into classifications, which are based on the perceived level of necessary information-exchange among police and community partners. The aim of the questionnaire is to gather academic responses to identify the level of risk in order that it can be defined as risk assess-ment level, which is key to enhancing the public?s reassurance in the police.

Matching what industry wants with what applicants want is a major problem for any IT academic department is matching what the jobs market requires to the types of courses which appeal to applicants. At the current time there is massive demand in the industry for software and embedded engineers, but IT academic departments have generally struggled to recruit candidates to these types of courses. At present courses focused on gaming, computer security, digital forensics, cybercrime, and digital design, are seeing a fast growth in applications. These hotspots, though, can create considerable problems for departments, especially as popular courses are often initially starved in terms teaching resources, because the staff cannot, or do not want to, move quickly enough into the new areas. Overall this tends to be the problem for the head of school who must judge whether something is a short-term ‘flash in the pan’ or a long-term trend. A few good examples of courses which had a peak and then settled down well to good amounts of long-term recruitment have been in software engineering, computer networking, and multimedia, all of which had a significant peak, and then have encountered glitches in recruitment, but have generally settled down to providing solid student recruitment. A major problem is thus in creating courses which are appealing to applicants and any existing student base, but which might not match to the requirements of industry. The way that academia often deals with this is to focus a great deal of attention on the programme title, so that it is attractive to candidates, while also being useful in defining the scope of the programme to recruiters. Buried within the programme, though, are the areas of study which are the key things that industry actually needs. This is why many IT programmes often do not mention the words software development, business studies, project management, and ethics within the programme title, but still teach them. Useful within the title would be things such as media design, digital forensics, and gaming, as these are likely to attract candidates. Employers thus often need to avoid looking at the programme title, and look in more detail at the actual modules which are used in the programme, to see the scope of any software development and business integration. Within many programmes in IT there can be a marginalisation of the subject area due to the demands of students currently on these courses. This has been seen with computer networks, where programmes were created with a wide range of modules, in areas such as business studies and software development, which generally enrich the scope of the programme. Over the year, though, students often demand more modules in their focus, which can be to their disadvantage when they join the jobs market. The push of the major vendors In the IT industry one of the major moves over the last few years has been from vendors such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Juniper, providing a wide range of professional certification, intended to match training to the actual needs of industry. Academia then has a difficulty in whether to adopt and integrate the professional certification into their programmes, or to continue to focus on core academic skills development. Applicants, though, are now becoming generally savvy in spotting where this type of infrastructure has been created, which makes programmes which integrate the material more attractive in future job potentials. Thus many programmes now highlight the integration with Microsoft and Cisco Systems, in providing relevant professional skills. A major worry for many though is that academic programmes are far too focused on material produced by the major vendors, which limits the scope of knowledge that students can gain. While there has been a reduction in the focus of vendor derived material on their own product range, there still seems to be a lack of strong academic underpinning in much vendor-produced material. A good academic department will understand the importance of following parts of the vendor certification, but giving a wide coverage of the key academic principles behind any topic. Along with this it is important that academic departments encourage their students into continual professional study, to gain advantage in the jobs market. Differing departmental profiles One thing for sure is that every IT academic department has a different profile in terms of its focus, and it is often this focus which can define how innovative a department is, and how much they need to be. In traditional research areas, there are many distinguished seats of learning, which have long track records for excellence and innovation in research and teaching. Medical and Business Schools, for example, have generally built up their expertise over many decades, and continue to be known for their lead in their domain. Computing and IT, though, is ever-changing, and each department has the opportunity to gain a lead over others by gaining a first-mover advantage. Over the past few decades this has happened with digital electronics, signal processing, microprocessor design, and so on. Each new technology brings opportunities to move and gain an advantage. Often this movement can fit into various profiles: • Old School, Slow Mover. Often a traditional learning institution, which does not require to adopt to new teaching environments and subjects, as it can easily recruit without showing new innovations. Over time it will generally adopt new subject areas depending on their factors such as their research profile. • New School, Fast Mover. This is a department which bases its growth on identifying new and exciting areas, and has key innovators who can move quickly and change their environments and subjects to match. If they move fast enough they can gain a significant lead on the rest of academia, and gain a significant reputation, especially if they can support the development of a research infrastructure with the development of the newly developed teaching area. This profile can be further split into ones which pick the right things, and then move in resources to expand the area, and ones which fail to sustain the investment, and lose out in the long term as the resources do not follow the initial lead. Some new subject areas can be slow burners, where a significant growth in applications is not seen for a year or two, while other can sparkle for a short time, and then fail in the medium term. • Old School, Late Mover. This is a department which generally does not innovate, but watches how other departments are performing in terms of recruitment, and adopts ideas that have been proven to be successful. There is generally less risk, but it can suffer from general down-turns in recruitment in the short-term, as there are no programmes giving a recruitment spike to overcome the general downturn. IT has been shown to be ever-changing, with new technologies springing up on a regular basis. This often leaves great opportunities for first movers, which could prove a winner in gaining a reputation in certain technological areas. The University of Abertay with Computer Games, and the University of Glamorgan with Computer Forensics, are good examples of how leadership can be gained with departments which move quickly and focus their resources into appealing areas. Without a sustained investment in research and knowledge transfer the first mover advantage can often lead to very little overall advantage, but the benefits can be great, in terms of the long-term sustainability of the whole department. Often, subjects which do not recruit well need the new areas to be able to justify their long-term base. Any department needs bright sparks, the people who are willing to move into new areas and take risks. Thus it is likely that new blood needs to be brought in on a regular basis, as departments can often stagnate around their existing expertise, leading to a long-term decline. Generally it is unusual to see new programmes filled with completely new modules. The most common is to see one or two new modules, often in the later years of courses, which start to show some appeal to existing students or to industry. This appeal is then often used to justify the development of a programme of study, in which the department needs to decide whether it can be sustained, given a few years to prove itself. Academia in the UK has often seen the creation of programmes which have failed due to a lack of market demand. A major problem is that it is often difficult to get real-life market assessments, and most departments will typically try an idea, and see if it attracts students. If it does, the resources will generally follow. Cloud-based Teaching A major problem in academia is to try and keep up-to-date with subjects and technologies, so that it often lags industry. The use of virtualised and cloud-based environments, though, provides an excellent opportunity to enhance learning and to provide students with skills which exactly match the requirements of industry, along with integrating with professional certification. At Edinburgh Napier University, a VMware vCenter Cloud infrastructure has been created to teach computer security and digital forensics, where students can learn on an enhanced infrastructure which would not have been possible before the extensive development of virtualised and cloud-based infrastructures. For enhanced methods used within computer security, a private cloud can be used, and for more general teaching, such as in databases and operating systems, a public cloud can be used to support this. This then provides exposure to a wide range of environments which are pre-build, or which are built-up throughout the module, and thus supports the students within a safe environment in which they can learn without any danger, and where errors can be easily undone. The environments can thus be created to use industry-standard tools and infrastructure, and these can be joined together to create collaborative work, along with the continuation of work after the practical lab work has been done. In fact virtualisation offers academia the opportunity to create infrastructures that would be difficult within a real-world, and also match-up with the requirements of professional certification, as illustrated in Figure 1. http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1toxn/VitALMagazineSeptemb/resources/index.htm?referrerUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yudu.com%2Fitem%2Fdetails%2F394350%2FVitAL-Magazine-September-2011

This paper focuses on the integration of virtualised environments within the teaching of computer security and digital forensics, and includes three case studies. The first case study involves assessing student perception on the usage of VMware Workstation and AWS (Amazon Web Services) for security and digital forensics labs, while the other two present a performance and reflective evaluation of a Cloud-based infrastructure using VMware ESXi. The evaluation for the first case study shows the results of a questionnaire for the integration of VMware Workstation and AWS, and highlights that the virtualised environment seems to engage students more than traditional desktop ones, along with identifying the key areas which seem to be useful, such as for network forensics and in running instances within a sand-boxed environment. The other two case studies show an evaluation of the performance impact of security and digital forensics students using a Cloud-based infrastructure for their labs, and that the developed infrastructure copes well with both scheduled lab-based classes, remote access, and a virtualised environment for courseworks.

This paper outlines the usage of AES in Microsoft .NET. It provides a basic overview of the AES method, along with a review of other popular encryption methods and some sample code which can be used to implement AES.

The introduction of Information Governance throughout the NHS in Great Britain from 2004 onwards, saw Pri-mary Care Medicine subject to a regulatory regime aligning current practice with codes, ethics, legislation and standards. However the Information Commissioners Office, as regulator of Healthcare Data Controllers, has issued statu-tory Undertakings to stem the tide of continued leakage of sensitive health data. Drawing on research from America, the issue of IT Security Risk is presented as problematic given the limitations of surveys indentifying industry trends and is viewed beyond the traditional Threat Value Asset Matrix towards a framework incorporating the reasonable man –taking all due care and diligence as is reasonably practicable in the circumstances. Following the identification of major problems across 10% of English general practices in comply-ing with both Confidentiality and Data Protection Assurance, and Information Security Assurance, a national survey of GP Practices was undertaken to investigate security incidents and risk. Contemporaneous to this, information on reported unto-ward security incidents was obtained from the regulator and all Health Boards across Scotland. Together, these results identified actual risk to securing patient data and concerns voiced from within the sector. This may be of relevance to practitioners, managers as well as policy makers particularly where changes to the structure of the NHS are proposed.

This paper outlines the usage of 3DES in Microsoft .NET. It provides a basic overview of the 3-DES method, along with a review of other popular encryption methods and some sample code which can be used to implement 3DES.

This paper argues that despite the wide adoption of Internet technologies in destination marketing, information is still disseminated through printed brochures that have largely remained unchanged and unaffected by the trend towards greater personalisation of service. We argue that innovations in IT such as digital printing, allow for the replacement of the inflexible brochures of the past with dynamic, customised brochures. Such changes allow the Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) and other tourism providers to significantly improve the element of personalisation of their products, gain valuable marketing and intelligence data about their customers and substantially reduce their printing and posting costs.

Przyst?pny i praktyczny poradnik dotycz?cy u?ytkowania komputerów, obejmuj?cy szeroki zakres zagadnie? zwi?zanych z przetwarzaniem informacji i transmisj? danych oraz ich kompresj?, przechowywaniem, szyfrowaniem i bezpiecze?stwem, zawieraj?cy tak?e opis protokó?u internetowego, sieci WWW, poczty elektronicznej i multimediów. Samodzielne rozwi?zanie zamieszczonych ?wicze? testowych u?atwi zrozumienie i utrwalenie tre?ci poszczególnych rozdzia?ów.

The second edition of the Handbook of Data Communications and Networks covers many of the key areas in modern communication systems. It is split into several sections, including: Data Communications, Interfaces, Networks, Network Protocols, Networking Elements, Session Protocols, Network Operating Systems.

This book provides the student with comprehensive coverage of both networks and system architecture. It aims to introduce the most widely used networking protocols and distributed systems, covering recent developments in distributed processing and the WWW, the use of Internet and Intranets, and the integration of networking into operating systems. The book will be supported by a website offering downloadable Java source code, on-line testing for students, and project-related WWW work.

Ksi??ka ta m. In. Uczy jak korzysta? z internetu i sieci www.Opisuje bowiem techniczne aspekty tej ?wiatowej sieci informacyjnej. Dlatego te? mo?e by? wykorzystywana przez wszystkich uczniów i studentów, którzy nie tylko chc? korzysta? z internetu, lecz tak?e dowiedzie? si?, jak jest zorganizowana i jak dzia?a ta "paj?czyna"..

The use of data communications and computer networks is constantly increasing, bringing benefits to most of the countries and peoples of the world, and serving as the lifeline of industry. Now there is a textbook that discusses data communications and networking in a readable form that can be easily understood by students who will become the IS professionals of the future. Advanced Data Communications and Networks provides a comprehensive and practical treatment of rapidly evolving areas. The text is divided into seven main sections and appendices: "General data compression"Video, images, and sound"Error coding and encryption"TCP/IP and the Internet"Network operating systems"LANs/WANs"Cables and connectors Other topics include error detection/correction, image/video compression, digital video, digital audio, TCP/IP, HTTP, electronic mail, HTML, Windows NT, NetWare, UNIX, Fast Ethernet, ATM, FDDI, and much more. Written by a respected academician who is also an accomplished engineer, this textbook uses the author's wide practical experience in applying techniques and theory toward solving real engineering problems. It also includes an accompanying Web site that contains software, source code, and other supplemental information.

The finite-difference time-domain method gives accurate results for the calculation of electromagnetic wave propagation and hence can be used in a number of university final-year projects. The paper shows a novel application of the method in predicting electric fields from conductors on a PCB

The authors have taken the 3D FDTD approach to simulate the propagation of electrical signals within and around printed circuit boards (PCBs). This relates to the work currently being carried out into the propagation of very high speed digital pulses in PCBs for high bandwidth systems. The authors have further demonstrated the use of parallel processing to reduce simulation time. Visualisation of an applied gaussian pulse from multiple sources within and without a PCB are shown and the techniques used to determine the system characteristics are discussed in this paper.

This paper defines a structured methodology which is based on the foundational work of Al-Shaer et al. in [1] and that of Hamed and Al-Shaer in [2]. It defines a methodology for the declaration of policy field elements, through to the syntax, ontology and functional verification stages. In their works of [1] and [2] the authors concentrated on developing formal definitions of possible anomalies between rules in a network firewall rule set. Their work is considered as the foundation for further works on anomaly detection, including those of Fitzgerald et al. [3], Chen et al. [4], Hu et al. [5], among others. This paper extends this work by applying the methods to information sharing policies, and outlines the evaluation related to these.

This paper outlines a novel information sharing method using Binary Decision Diagrams (BBDs). It is inspired by the work of Al-Shaer and Hamed, who applied BDDs into the modelling of network firewalls. This is applied into an information sharing policy system which optimizes the search of redundancy, shadowing, generalisation and correlation within information sharing rules.

This paper outlines the usage of RC2 in Microsoft .NET. It provides a basic overview of the RC2 method, along with a review of other popular encryption methods and some sample code which can be used to implement RC2.

This paper discusses privacy enhancing technologies in the field of inter-agency data sharing, a key government objective for efficient public service delivery. We analyse the legal and conceptual framework that governs multi-agency cooperation in particular in the field of child protection work, and develop two approaches to represent relevant data protection ideas computationally in the infrastructure that agencies use to exchange sensitive personal data.