Information Security Commons^™

Crisis Communication And Executive Leadership: Ethical Shortcomings In Government, Daniel Davidoff

School of Professional Studies

This research thesis project is an analysis of how and why governments fail in their attempts at crisis communication. The hypotheses tested are: there exists a negative correlation between unethical leadership and successful crisis communication practices. And governments are more likely to experience these failures due to ethical disconnects in modern politics. Research includes a review of relevant academic literature regarding crisis communication theory, as well as the ethical framework that can be applied to that theory. Cases considered are Hurricane Katrina, the choking death of Eric Garner, and the COVID-19 global pandemic. The research project concludes with a recommendation …

Becoming A Trauma Informed Care Organization, Katie Robery

School of Professional Studies

The Brockton Area Mutli Services Inc or BAMSI is a private, non-profit human services organization providing services to adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental illness, behavioral health, and public health needs. Founded in 1975, BAMSI is in the business of “bringing people and services together.” BAMSI transforms lives by building the capacity of individuals, families, organizations, and communities to learn, thrive, and achieve their goals. BAMSI services promote the recovery, resiliency, and self-determination of the people we serve. As a human services leader, we strive to be the provider of choice. (Duffy, 2019) With an emphasis on respect and …

Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace; Benefits, Challenges And Strategies For Success, Margaret Leone

School of Professional Studies

In this case study I have explored the topic of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and learned how it can transform a business. When D&I is a serious business strategy supported by senior management it can help recruit and retain top talent, increase profits, and unleash creativity among other benefits. It is important to have leadership that is inclusive so they can set the tone for their staff

This case study evaluates the D&I culture at The Children’s Study Home (CHS) and explores best practices for improvement. CHS is a non-profit human service agency in Western MA, that’s mission …

Young People, Social Media, And Impacts On Well-Being, Andreana Nop

School of Professional Studies

Millennials and Generation Z were born into an age where social media and digital technology have been integrated in nearly all aspects of their lives. While social media has proven to be a valuable communication tool in connecting with each other and sharing information, the long-term psychosocial effects are beginning to become more apparent as social media matures. This study analyzes what these effects are and how communication is impacted for these young people. It questions how young people can leverage social media and decrease harm. The study will be conducted through a literature review and analysis. Its goal is …

Managing Burnout And Secondary Traumatic Stress In Human Service Organizations, Naomi Ingram

School of Professional Studies

This Case Study explores how burnout and secondary traumatic stress impact staffing, service delivery, and organizational effectiveness in a human service agency. The Case Study is focused around Ascentria Care Alliance’s Children & Family Services in Massachusetts, which encompasses three foster care programs: the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor (URM), Division of Children’s Services (DCS), and Intensive Foster Care (IFC) programs. Both individual and organizational approaches are needed to most effectively address burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Individual workers need to build resilience factors such as self-compassion and mindfulness, set appropriate boundaries with clients, engage in ongoing training, support, consultation, and supervision, …

Rest Homes: Their Value On Massachusetts Healthcare Continuum, Ronald Pawelski

School of Professional Studies

In Massachusetts, rest homes provide cost effective care for elderly residents in a community setting. Rest homes, however, are not well-understood and the rest home industry itself suffers greatly, not only from a lack of understanding of the services they provide, but also from the strain on their financial resources due to both competition from other healthcare options and insufficient reimbursement rates for residents’ care.

The paper explores the financial challenges facing the industry and outlines the data that speaks to the value of the rest home care option for both the residents themselves and Massachusetts state healthcare budget. It …

A Case Study On The Best Practices Of The Facilitating Organization For Peer Recovery Support Services In The State Of New Hampshire, Maggie Ringey

School of Professional Studies

In working with the Facilitating Organization for Peer Recovery Support Services through Harbor Homes, I have found that the Recovery Community Organizations that receive support through the FO provide valuable services that help individuals that struggle with substance use disorder achieve and maintain long term sobriety and recovery. The RCOs throughout New Hampshire bridge gaps in services and treatments that are left untouched by traditional clinical methods and through regular check ins, participants at the RCOs have reported that the services provided resulted in positive outcomes in their lives. Throughout the course of this research, I found that the RCOs …

Elder Isolation In Immigrant Communities, Jessica Da Silva

School of Professional Studies

This paper examined loneliness, as a measurement of perceived social isolation, in older immigrant adults. Previous research shows that older adults are more likely to experience social isolation and loneliness. Both of which have a direct correlation with their overall health (Wilson & Molton, 2010, Cacioppo et al., 2002) and mortality rates (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2015). Another international study found that immigrants in particular are at a higher risk for experiencing loneliness (Government of Canada, 2018). In this study, 35 immigrants and non-immigrants participants answered a survey which included 20 questions from the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 (Russel, 1996). …

Dallas, Tx: The Staggering Wealth Gap, Macy Golman

School of Professional Studies

In the summer of 2019, I had the privilege of serving as an AmeriCorps member with an organization called Equal Heart. One of Equal Heart’s main initiatives was to provide meals to children in underserved populations, to make sure that without school in session, these children would still be receiving food. Unfortunately, in many instances, without these meals, many of the children we served would likely not know when they would be eating their next fulfilling meal. There were certain pockets of Dallas that we would travel to everyday, places that were fifteen minutes maximum from my house, but places …

Secure And Efficient Models For Retrieving Data From Encrypted Databases In Cloud, Sultan Ahmed A Almakdi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recently, database users have begun to use cloud database services to outsource their databases. The reason for this is the high computation speed and the huge storage capacity that cloud owners provide at low prices. However, despite the attractiveness of the cloud computing environment to database users, privacy issues remain a cause for concern for database owners since data access is out of their control. Encryption is the only way of assuaging users’ fears surrounding data privacy, but executing Structured Query Language (SQL) queries over encrypted data is a challenging task, especially if the data are encrypted by a randomized …

Cyber Security’S Influence On Modern Society, Nicholas Vallarelli

Honors College Theses

The world of cyber security is evolving every day, and cyber-criminals are trying to take advantage of it to gain as much money and power as possible. As the Internet continues to grow, more people around the world join the Internet. The purpose of this is to see how much of an importance cyber security has and how cyber-criminals are able to utilize the cyberworld for their own personal gain. Research has been done on how the cyberworld got where it is today. Additionally, individual research has been done in an effort to learn how to hack. A hack lab …

Dynamic Fraud Detection Via Sequential Modeling, Panpan Zheng

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The impacts of information revolution are omnipresent from life to work. The web services have signicantly changed our living styles in daily life, such as Facebook for communication and Wikipedia for knowledge acquirement. Besides, varieties of information systems, such as data management system and management information system, make us work more eciently. However, it is usually a double-edged sword. With the popularity of web services, relevant security issues are arising, such as fake news on Facebook and vandalism on Wikipedia, which denitely impose severe security threats to OSNs and their legitimate participants. Likewise, oce automation incurs another challenging security issue, …

Vzwam Web-Based Lookup, Ruben Claudio

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

This web-based lookup will allow V employees to find territory sales rep much faster. It will simplify the process and eliminate manual processes.

At the moment, a combination of multiple manual processes is needed to find territory sales reps. The company’s CRM does not allow to find rep sales quickly. When an in-house sales representative is talking to a prospect, this sales rep has to go through a few series of steps to find an outside or territory sales rep --which is usually needed to schedule in-person meetings, that results in delays while doing transactions with the prospects. Besides, because …

Pmkt: Privacy-Preserving Multi-Party Knowledge Transfer For Financial Market Forecasting, Zhuoran Ma, Jianfeng Ma, Yinbin Miao, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Xiangyu Wang, Tengfei Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While decision-making task is critical in knowledge transfer, particularly from multi-source domains, existing knowledge transfer approaches are not generally designed to be privacy preserving. This has potential legal and financial implications, particularly in sensitive applications such as financial market forecasting. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Privacy-preserving Multi-party Knowledge Transfer system (PMKT), based on decision trees, for financial market forecasting. Specifically, in PMKT, we leverage a cryptographic-based model sharing technique to securely outsource knowledge reflected in decision trees of multiple parties, and design a secure computation mechanism to facilitate privacy-preserving knowledge transfer. An encrypted user-submitted request from the target …

Symbolic Verification Of Message Passing Interface Programs, Hengbiao Yu, Zhenbang Chen, Xianjin Fu, Ji Wang, Zhendong Su, Jun Sun, Chun Huang, Wei Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Message passing is the standard paradigm of programming in high-performance computing. However, verifying Message Passing Interface (MPI) programs is challenging, due to the complex program features (such as non-determinism and non-blocking operations). In this work, we present MPI symbolic verifier (MPI-SV), the first symbolic execution based tool for automatically verifying MPI programs with non-blocking operations. MPI-SV combines symbolic execution and model checking in a synergistic way to tackle the challenges in MPI program verification. The synergy improves the scalability and enlarges the scope of verifiable properties. We have implemented MPI-SV and evaluated it with 111 real-world MPI verification tasks. The …

Data Breach Consequences And Responses: A Multi-Method Investigation Of Stakeholders, Hamid Reza Nikkhah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The role of information in today’s economy is essential as organizations that can effectively store and leverage information about their stakeholders can gain an advantage in their markets. The extensive digitization of business information can make organizations vulnerable to data breaches. A data breach is the unauthorized access to sensitive, protected, or confidential data resulting in the compromise of information security. Data breaches affect not only the breached organization but also various related stakeholders. After a data breach, stakeholders of the breached organizations show negative behaviors, which causes the breached organizations to face financial and non-financial costs. As such, the …

Mitigating Real-Time Relay Phishing Attacks Against Mobile Push Notification Based Two-Factor Authentication Systems, Casey Silver

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This paper explores how existing push notification based two-factor authentication systems are susceptible to real-time man-in-the-middle relay attacks and proposes a system for mitigating such attacks. A fully functional reference system of the proposed mitigation was built and compared to an existing push notification two-factor authentication system while undergoing a real-time man-in-the-middle relay attack. The reference systems used cloud infrastructure for hosting, an Apple iPhone as the notification receiver, and Apple’s push notification service to send notifications. A publicly available tool for conducting real-time man-in-the-middle relay attacks was used to conduct the attacks. The results of the tests were recorded …

Knot Flow Classification And Its Applications In Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (Vanet), David Schmidt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) play a crucial role in the identification and mitigation for attacks on host systems. Of these systems, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are difficult to protect due to the dynamic nature of their clients and their necessity for constant interaction with their respective cyber-physical systems. Currently, there is a need for a VANET-specific IDS that meets this criterion. To this end, a spline-based intrusion detection system has been pioneered as a solution. By combining clustering with spline-based general linear model classification, this knot flow classification method (KFC) allows for robust intrusion detection to occur. Due its …

A Blockchain Approach For Negotiating Trust In Iot, Skailer Knezevic

Theses and Dissertations

“The internet is no longer a web that we connect to. Instead, its a computerized, networked, and interconnected world that we live in. This is the future, and what were calling the Internet of Things.”- Bruce Schneier, 2019 The Internet of Things is becoming a big part of our lives. Every year there are more devices with the capability to connect on the internet and communicate with each other. Today there are over 400 million IoT devices in the world, and this number is predicted to grow to 1.5 billion devices by 2022 [14]. It is becoming more difficult to …

The Future Of Work Now: Cyber Threat Attribution At Fireeye, Thomas H. Davenport, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the most frequently-used phrases at business events these days is “the future of work.” It’s increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other new technologies will bring substantial changes in work tasks and business processes. But while these changes are predicted for the future, they’re already present in many organizations for many different jobs. The job and incumbent described below is an example of this phenomenon. It’s a clear example of an existing job that’s been transformed by AI and related tools.

A Fully Distributed Hierarchical Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme, Ali Mohammad, Javad Mohajeri, Ximeng Liu, Ximeng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of cloud computing, many enterprises have been interested in outsourcing their data to cloud servers to decrease IT costs and rise capabilities of provided services. To afford confidentiality and fine-grained data access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE) was proposed and used in several cloud storage systems. However, scalability and flexibility in key delegation and user revocation mechanisms are primary issues in ABE systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a fully distributed revocable ciphertext-policy hierarchical ABE (FDR-CP-HABE) and design the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. Our scheme offers a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key …

A Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Cnn Feature Extraction Framework For Mobile Sensing, Kai Huang, Ximeng Liu, Shaojing Fu, Deke Guo, Ming Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The proliferation of various mobile devices equipped with cameras results in an exponential growth of the amount of images. Recent advances in the deep learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN) have made CNN feature extraction become an effective way to process these images. However, it is still a challenging task to deploy the CNN model on the mobile sensors, which are typically resource-constrained in terms of the storage space, the computing capacity, and the battery life. Although cloud computing has become a popular solution, data security and response latency are always the key issues. Therefore, in this paper, we propose …

Storage Management Strategy In Mobile Phones For Photo Crowdsensing, En Wang, Zhengdao Qu, Xinyao Liang, Xiangyu Meng, Yongjian Yang, Dawei Li, Weibin Meng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In mobile crowdsensing, some users jointly finish a sensing task through the sensors equipped in their intelligent terminals. In particular, the photo crowdsensing based on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) collects pictures for some specific targets or events and uploads them to nearby edge servers, which leads to richer data content and more efficient data storage compared with the common mobile crowdsensing; hence, it has attracted an important amount of attention recently. However, the mobile users prefer uploading the photos through Wifi APs (PoIs) rather than cellular networks. Therefore, photos stored in mobile phones are exchanged among users, in order to …

Teaching Data Carving Using The Real World Problem Of Text Message Extraction From Unstructured Mobile Device Data Dumps, Gary D. Cantrell, Joan Runs Through

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Data carving is a technique used in data recovery to isolate and extract files based on file content without any file system guidance. It is an important part of data recovery and digital forensics, but it is also useful in teaching computer science students about file structure and binary encoding of information especially within a digital forensics program. This work demonstrates how the authors teach data carving using a real world problem they encounter in digital forensics evidence processing involving the extracting of text messages from unstructured small device binary extractions. The authors have used this problem for instruction in …

Cyber-Security Risks Of Fedwire, Mark J. Bilger

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper will review the risks associated with the Federal Reserve's Fedwire network as a key resource necessary for the efficient function of the American financial system. It will examine the business model of the Fedwire system of real-time interbank transfers, the network characteristics of Fedwire, and the possibility of a successful attack on Fedwire and its potential impact on the U.S. financial system.

Mitigating Safety Concerns And Profit/Production Losses For Chemical Process Control Systems Under Cyberattacks Via Design/Control Methods, Helen Durand, Matthew Wegener

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

One of the challenges for chemical processes today, from a safety and profit standpoint, is the potential that cyberattacks could be performed on components of process control systems. Safety issues could be catastrophic; however, because the nonlinear systems definition of a cyberattack has similarities to a nonlinear systems definition of faults, many processes have already been instrumented to handle various problematic input conditions. Also challenging is the question of how to design a system that is resilient to attacks attempting to impact the production volumes or profits of a company. In this work, we explore a process/equipment design framework for …

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 …

A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Policy For The United States Government According To Cyberattacks And Exploits In The 21st Century, Diana Hallisey

Honors Program Contracts

Adversaries launch cyberattacks or cyber-exploits with contrasting intentions and desired outcomes. A cyberattack is a malicious attempt by a state, third party, or individual to disrupt a computer’s network; whereas, a cyber-exploit is an action that uncovers and steals “confidential” information from a computer’s data. 1 Within this research paper, the main adversary of such cyberattacks and/or exploits will be the nation-state. The victims of these cyberattacks will range from multinational corporations, such as Sony, to nuclear programs in Iran. This essay will focus on four motivations behind such cyberattacks: (1) private sector hacking (the theft of intellectual property) (2) …

Searchbreaches.Me, Ajay Shah, Harshal Patel, Eric Gargiulo

Petersheim Academic Exposition

No abstract provided.

Byod-Insure: A Security Assessment Model For Enterprise Byod, Melva Ratchford

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

As organizations continue allowing employees to use their personal mobile devices to access the organizations’ networks and the corporate data, a phenomenon called ‘Bring Your Own Device’ or BYOD, proper security controls need to be adopted not only to secure the corporate data but also to protect the organizations against possible litigation problems. Until recently, current literature and research have been focused on specific areas or solutions regarding BYOD. The information associated with BYOD security issues in the areas of Management, IT, Users and Mobile Device Solutions is fragmented. This research is based on a need to provide a holistic …