Information Security Commons^™

Toward A Student-Ready Cybersecurity Program: Findings From A Survey Of Stem-Students, Lora Pitman, Brian K. Payne, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin, Lenora Thorbjornsen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As the number of available cybersecurity jobs continues to grow, colleges strive to offer to their cybersecurity students an environment which will make them sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce after graduation. This paper explores the academic and professional needs of STEM-students in various higher education institutions across Virginia and how cybersecurity programs can cater to these needs. It also seeks to propose an evidence-based approach for improving the existing cybersecurity programs so that they can become more inclusive and student-ready. A survey of 251 college students in four higher-education institutions in Virginia showed that while there are common patterns …

Editorial, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord, Hossain Shahriar

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Since 2016, it has been the mission of the Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice (JCERP) to be a premier outlet for high-quality information security and cybersecurity-related articles of interest to teaching faculty and students. This is the 13^th edition of the (JCERP) and, as ever, we are seeking authors who produce high-quality research and practice-oriented articles focused on the development and delivery of information security and cybersecurity curriculum, innovation in applied scholarship, and industry best practices in information security and cybersecurity in the enterprise for double-blind review and publication. The journal invites submissions on Information Security, Cybersecurity, …

Emotional Analysis Of Learning Cybersecurity With Games Using Iot, Maria Valero, Md Jobair Hossain, Shahriar Sobhan

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The constant rise of cyber-attacks poses an increasing demand for more qualified people with cybersecurity knowledge. Games have emerged as a well-fitted technology to engage users in learning processes. In this paper, we analyze the emotional parameters of people while learning cybersecurity through computer games. The data are gathered using a non-invasive Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to study the signals directly from the users’ brains. We analyze six performance metrics (engagement, focus, excitement, stress, relaxation, and interest) of 12 users while playing computer games to measure the effectiveness of the games to attract the attention of the participants. Results show participants …

Resilience Vs. Prevention. Which Is The Better Cybersecurity Practice?, Frank Katz

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Students in multiple cohorts of our 3000 level Fundamentals of Information Systems Security course were given a discussion question where they had to either agree or disagree with the premise that given all the constant threats to our systems, we should dedicate more of our efforts to quickly repairing the damage of an attack rather than dedicate more of our time and energies to preventing such attacks. They were required to give their reasoning and provide sources to back up their analysis of his comment.

This paper will describe and explain the concept of cyber resiliency. It will then evaluate …

Warshipping: Hacking The Mailroom, Jackson Szwast, Bryson Payne

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Everyone knows what package shipping is, but not everyone knows what warshipping is. Corporate mailrooms are rarely considered as part of the cybersecurity attack surface of most organizations, but they offer physical access to millions of uninspected packages daily. UPS shipped 5.5 billion items last year, with their daily average being 21.9 million items and operating through 1,800 locations in 2020. FedEx shipped 6.5 million packages daily and operates 2,150 locations. The United States Postal Service delivered 143 billion pieces of mail in 2019. Increasingly the world’s consumers are relying on e-commerce, and during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, package deliveries …

Towards Assessing Password Workarounds And Perceived Risk To Data Breaches For Organizational Cybersecurity Risk Management Taxonomy, Michael J. Rooney, Yair Levy, Wei Li, Ajoy Kumar

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cybersecurity involves a broad range of techniques, including cyber-physical, managerial, and technical, while authentication provides a layer of protection for Information Systems (IS) against data breaches. The recent COVID-19 pandemic brought a tsunami of data breach incidents worldwide. Authentication serves as a mechanism for IS against unauthorized access utilizing various defense techniques, with the most popular and frequently used technique being passwords. However, the dramatic increase of user accounts over the past few decades has exposed the realization that technological measures alone cannot ensure high level of IS security; this leaves the end-users holding a critical role in protecting their …

Analyzing Robotics Software Vulnerabilities, Hossain Shahriar, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Shahriar Sobhan, Mohammad Nazim

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Robots are widely used in our day-to-day life in various domains. For example, eldercare robots, such as CareO-Bots [1]are used to perform household tasks and provide mobility assistance [2]. Amazon uses manufacturing robots to accomplish manufacturing labor activities, such as welding and assembling equipment [2]. According to the International Data Corporation, spending on robotics is expected to reach USD 241.4 billion by the end of 2023 [4].

However, malicious users can exploit security vulnerabilities in hardware and software components of robotics systems to conduct security attacks and cause malfunction, i.e., deviate robots from their expected behaviors. Security attacks on robots …

A Taxonomy Of Cyberattacks Against Critical Infrastructure, Miloslava Plachkinova, Ace Vo

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The current study proposes a taxonomy to organize existing knowledge on cybercrimes against critical infrastructure such as power plants, water treatment facilities, dams, and nuclear facilities. Routine Activity Theory is used to inform a three-dimensional taxonomy with the following dimensions: hacker motivation (likely offender), cyber, physical, and cyber-physical components of any cyber-physical system (suitable target), and security (capable guardian). The focus of the study is to develop and evaluate the classification tool using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. Publicly available data was used to evaluate the utility and usability of the proposed artifact by exploring three possible scenarios – Stuxnet, …

An Empirical Study Of Thermal Attacks On Edge Platforms, Tyler Holmes

Symposium of Student Scholars

Cloud-edge systems are vulnerable to thermal attacks as the increased energy consumption may remain undetected, while occurring alongside normal, CPU-intensive applications. The purpose of our research is to study thermal effects on modern edge systems. We also analyze how performance is affected from the increased heat and identify preventative measures. We speculate that due to the technology being a recent innovation, research on cloud-edge devices and thermal attacks is scarce. Other research focuses on server systems rather than edge platforms. In our paper, we use a Raspberry Pi 4 and a CPU-intensive application to represent thermal attacks on cloud-edge systems. …

Secure Coding In Five Steps, Mini Zeng, Feng Zhu

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Software vulnerabilities have become a severe cybersecurity issue. There are numerous resources of industry best practices available, but it is still challenging to effectively teach secure coding practices. The resources are not designed for classroom usage because the amount of information is overwhelming for students. There are efforts in academia to introduce secure coding components into computer science curriculum, but a big gap between industry best practices and workforce skills still exists. Unlike many existing efforts, we focus on both the big picture of secure coding and hands-on projects. To achieve these two goals, we present five learning steps that …

Observations, Evaluations, And Recommendations For Deterlab From An Educational Perspective, Ahmed Ibrahim, Vitaly Ford

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

DETERLab is a cluster environment that provides a set of virtual machines that can be used by researchers and teachers to run cybersecurity experiments and competitions, and where it is possible to deploy different network configurations to research attack and defense mechanisms in the cyber world. While we were working to develop a pathway for producing more usable and effective cybersecurity educational resources by investigating and examining several projects, we examined DETERLab as a prospective platform to use in the classroom. Throughout our experimentation, we faced challenges that we decided to document in order to help other educators use the …

An Exploratory Study Of Mode Efficacy In Cybersecurity Training, Michael D. Workman

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cybersecurity capabilities in organizations and governmental agencies continue to lag behind the threats. Given the current environment, these entities have placed renewed emphasis on cybersecurity education. However, education appears to lack its full potential in most settings. Few empirical studies have systematically tested the efficacy of various training methods and modes, and those that have been conducted have yielded inconsistent findings. Recent literature on the use of gamified simulations have suggested that they may improve cybersecurity behaviors. Similarly, live activities such as hackathons and capture the flag events have been surmised to augment learning and capabilities. We conducted an exploratory …

Gophish: Implementing A Real-World Phishing Exercise To Teach Social Engineering, Andy Luse, Jim Burkman

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Social engineering is a large problem in our modern technological world, but while conceptually understood, it is harder to teach compared to traditional pen testing techniques. This research details a class project where students implemented a phishing exercise against real-world targets. Through cooperation with an external corporate partner, students learned the legal, technical, behavioral, analysis, and reporting aspects of social engineering. The outcome provided both usable data for a real-world corporation as well as valuable educational experience for the students.

Applying High Impact Practices In An Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Program, Brian K. Payne, Lisa Mayes, Tisha Paredes, Elizabeth Smith, Hongyi Wu, Chunsheng Xin

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The Center for Cybersecurity Education and Research at Old Dominion University has expanded its use of high impact practices in the university’s undergraduate cybersecurity degree program. Strategies developed to promote student learning included learning communities, undergraduate research, a robust internship program, service learning, and electronic portfolios. This paper reviews the literature on these practices, highlights the way that they were implemented in our cybersecurity program, and discusses some of the challenges encountered with each practice. Although the prior literature on high impact practices rarely touches on cybersecurity coursework, the robust evidence of the success of those practices provides a sound …

An Assessment Of Internet Use And Cyber-Risk Prevalence Among Students In Selected Nigerian Secondary Schools, Adeola O. Opesade Dr, Abiodun O. Adetona Mr

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The use of the Internet has become highly pervasive among adolescents. While these people derive numerous benefits from their use of this technology, they are also faced with a challenge of being exposed to many cyber risks. Nigeria is a developing country with a teeming population of adolescents who are regular users of the Internet, but with inadequate research on adolescent Internet safety. There is therefore, a need to conduct studies on child online risks in Nigeria, to help evaluate the enormity of child online abuses. The present study investigated Internet use and cyber-risk prevalence among four hundred secondary school …

From The Editors, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord, Hossain Shahriar

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

A commentary from the editors, with an overview of the articles contained in this issue of the Journal.

A Serious Game For Social Engineering Awareness Creation, Fabian Muhly, Philipp Leo, Stefano Caneppele

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Social engineering is a method used by offenders to deceive their targets utilizing rationales of human psychology. Offenders aim to exploit information and use them for intelligence purposes or financial gains. Generating resilience against these malicious methods is still challenging. Literature shows that serious gaming learning approaches are used more frequently to instill lasting retention effects. Serious games are interactive, experiential learning approaches that impart knowledge about rationales and concepts in a way that fosters retention. In three samples and totally 97 participants the study at hand evaluated a social engineering serious game for participants’ involvement and instruction compliance during …

Contingency Planning Amidst A Pandemic, Natalie C. Belford

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Proper prior planning prevents pitifully poor performance: The purpose of this research is to address mitigation approaches - disaster recovery, contingency planning, and continuity planning - and their benefits as they relate to university operations during a worldwide pandemic predicated by the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). The most relevant approach pertaining to the University’s needs and its response to the Coronavirus pandemic will be determined and evaluated in detail.

Developing An Ai-Powered Chatbot To Support The Administration Of Middle And High School Cybersecurity Camps, Jonathan He, Chunsheng Xin

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Throughout the Internet, many chatbots have been deployed by various organizations to answer questions asked by customers. In recent years, we have been running cybersecurity summer camps for youth. Due to COVID-19, our in-person camp has been changed to virtual camps. As a result, we decided to develop a chatbot to reduce the number of emails, phone calls, as well as the human burden for answering the same or similar questions again and again based on questions we received from previous camps. This paper introduces our practical experience to implement an AI-powered chatbot for middle and high school cybersecurity camps …

A Survey Of Serious Games For Cybersecurity Education And Training, Winston Anthony Hill Jr., Mesafint Fanuel, Xiaohong Yuan, Jinghua Zhang, Sajad Sajad

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Serious games can challenge users in competitive and entertaining ways. Educators have used serious games to increase student engagement in cybersecurity education. Serious games have been developed to teach students various cybersecurity topics such as safe online behavior, threats and attacks, malware, and more. They have been used in cybersecurity training and education at different levels. Serious games have targeted different audiences such as K-12 students, undergraduate and graduate students in academic institutions, and professionals in the cybersecurity workforce. In this paper, we provide a survey of serious games used in cybersecurity education and training. We categorize these games into …

Factors That Influence Hipaa Secure Compliance In Small And Medium-Size Health Care Facilities, Wlad Pierre-Francois, Indira Guzman

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

This study extends the body of literature concerning security compliance by investigating the antecedents of HIPPA security compliance. A conceptual model, specifying a set of hypothesized relationships between management support, security awareness, security culture; security behavior, and risk of sanctions to address their effect on HIPAA security compliance is presented. This model was developed based on the review of the literature, Protection Motivation Theory, and General Deterrence Theory. Specifically, the aim of the study is to examine the mediating role of risk of sanctions on HIPAA security compliance.

Towards An Assessment Of Pause Periods On User Habituation In Mitigation Of Phishing Attacks, Amy Antonucci, Yair Levy, Martha Snyder, Laurie Dringus

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Social engineering is the technique in which the attacker sends messages to build a relationship with the victim and convinces the victim to take some actions that lead to significant damages and losses. Industry and law enforcement reports indicate that social engineering incidents costs organizations billions of dollars. Phishing is the most pervasive social engineering attack. While email filtering and warning messages have been implemented for over three decades, organizations are constantly falling for phishing attacks. Prior research indicated that attackers use phishing emails to create an urgency and fear response in their victims causing them to use quick heuristics, …

Towards An Assessment Of Judgment Errors In Social Engineering Attacks Due To Environment And Device Type, Tommy Pollock, Yair Levy, Wei Li, Ajoy Kumar

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Phishing continues to be a significant invasive threat to computer and mobile device users. Cybercriminals continuously develop new phishing schemes using email, and malicious search engine links to gather personal information of unsuspecting users. This information is used for financial gains through identity theft schemes or draining financial accounts of victims. Users are often distracted and fail to fully process the phishing attacks then unknowingly fall victim to the scam until much later. Users operating mobile phones and computers are likely to make judgment errors when making decisions in distracting environments due to cognitive overload. Distracted users can fail to …

Cybersecurity Strategy Against Cyber Attacks Towards Smart Grids With Pvs, Fangyu Li, Maria Valero, Liang Zhao, Yousef Mahmoud

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cyber attacks threaten the security of distribution power grids, such as smart grids. The emerging renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics (PVs) with power electronics controllers introduce new potential vulnerabilities. Based on the electric waveform data measured by waveform sensors in the smart grids, we propose a novel cyber attack detection and identification approach. Firstly, we analyze the cyber attack impacts (including cyber attacks on the solar inverter causing unusual harmonics) on electric waveforms in distribution power grids. Then, we propose a novel deep learning based mechanism including attack detection and attack diagnosis. By leveraging the electric waveform sensor data …

An Assessment Of Global Research Activities On Children And Adolescent Online Security, Adeola O. Opesade Dr, Omolayo A. Adesina Ms.

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The use of the Internet among children and adolescents is now a norm in many parts of the world. As the Internet offers a wide range of benefits to these ones, so does it expose them to possible various risks and harm. Researchers in different countries across the world have engaged in the production of relevant research-based knowledge in order to make the virtual world a safe place for the younger ones. However, while studies have been carried out on the subject of Internet risk among children and adolescents, there is a dearth of information on the assessment of research …

Evaluating And Securing Text-Based Java Code Through Static Code Analysis, Jeong Yang, Young Lee, Amanda Fernandez, Joshua Sanchez

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As the cyber security landscape dynamically evolves and security professionals work to keep apace, modern-day educators face the issue of equipping a new generation for this dynamic landscape. With cyber-attacks and vulnerabilities substantially increased over the past years in frequency and severity, it is important to design and build secure software applications from the group up. Therefore, defensive secure coding techniques covering security concepts must be taught from beginning computer science programming courses to exercise building secure applications. Using static analysis, this study thoroughly analyzed Java source code in two textbooks used at a collegiate level, with the goal of …

Malaware Defensive: A Game To Train Users To Combat Malware, Tyler Moon, Tamirat Abegaz, Bryson Payne, Abi Salimi

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Several research findings indicate that basic cyber hygiene can potentially deter the majority of cyber threats. One of the ways cybersecurity professionals can prepare users to ensure proper hygiene is to help them develop their ability to spot the difference between normal and abnormal behavior in a computer system. Malware disrupts the normal behavior of a computer system. The lack of appropriate user training has been one of the main reasons behind the exposure of computer systems to threats, from social engineering to viruses, trojans, and ransomware. Basic knowledge about common behavioral characteristics of malware could help users identify potentially …

Superb: Superior Behavior-Based Anomaly Detection Defining Authorized Users' Traffic Patterns, Daniel Karasek

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Network anomalies are correlated to activities that deviate from regular behavior patterns in a network, and they are undetectable until their actions are defined as malicious. Current work in network anomaly detection includes network-based and host-based intrusion detection systems. However, network anomaly detection schemes can suffer from high false detection rates due to the base rate fallacy. When the detection rate is less than the false positive rate, which is found in network anomaly detection schemes working with live data, a high false detection rate can occur. To overcome such a drawback, this paper proposes a superior behavior-based anomaly detection …

Distributed Denial Of Service Attack Detection, Travis Blue

Master of Science in Information Technology Theses

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on web applications has been a persistent threat. Successful attacks can lead to inaccessible service to legitimate users in time and loss of business reputation. Most research effort on DDoS focused on network layer attacks. Existing approaches on application layer DDoS attack mitigation have limitations such as the lack of detection ability for low rate DDoS and not being able to detect attacks targeting resource files. In this work, we propose DDoS attack detection using concepts from information retrieval and machine learning. We include two popular concepts from information retrieval: Term Frequency (TF)-Inverse Document …

Divergent Student Views Of Cybersecurity, Susan E. Ramlo, John B. Nicholas

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Cybersecurity is a worldwide issue and concern. Prior studies indicate that many people do not use cybersecurity best practices. Although these prior studies used large-scale surveys or interviews, this study used Q methodology [Q] because Q provides greater insight than Likert-format surveys. In fact, Q was created to scientifically study subjectivity. Within a Q study, various stages as well as philosophical, epistemological, and ontological principles represent a complete methodology. At first, Q researchers collect items that represent the broad range of communications about the topic (called the concourse). Although the items can be pictures, scents, or other means of communication, …