OS and Networks Commons^™

Semantic Shields: Automating Critical Infrastructure Defense Via Nlp-Driven Ransomware Profiling, Henry Trowbridge, Ian Zalcberg, Ryan Schley, Carter Yagemann, Natasha Phan, Srikar Maduposu, Vimal Buck

Military Cyber Affairs

Ransomware poses a growing threat to critical infrastructure, where successful attacks can disrupt operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) with significant public safety consequences. However, attributing ransomware incidents to specific threat actors remains challenging due to ransomware-as-a-service ecosystems, actor rebranding, and the obfuscation of traditional indicators of compromise. This paper presents Semantic Shields, an NLP-driven attribution framework that leverages BERT-generated semantic embeddings and DBSCAN clustering to profile ransomware actors through the linguistic characteristics of ransom notes. Using a dataset of 295 ransom notes from 189 distinct threat groups, the framework achieved an 87.2% true positive clustering rate and …

Mechanisms To Reduce Cyber Threats And Risks, Saad Alsuwaileh

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

Addressing the mechanisms of reducing cyber threats and risks Research Because cyberspace is an important arena for various international interactions, especially in recent times in light of the increase in cyber-attacks between some countries, which affects their national security. In this context, many countries are trying to make an effort to develop their capabilities to be used in any cyber-attack, or to take adequate preventive measures to protect them from any possible cyberattacks, especially in light of the impact of these attacks on vital places and institutions such as banks and ministries or on important facilities such as water and …

Artificial Intelligence Mechanisms In Countering Violent Extremism, Ammar Al-Babli

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The research idea revolves around the mechanisms of artificial intelligence in monitoring and combating extremist groups' dissemination of bad, misleading ideas, destructive ideologies, fake images, and videos, especially those related to terrorism and extremism. Artificial intelligence can be used to confront violent extremism on social media platforms. Social media companies widely use artificial intelligence in their efforts to remove and ban terrorist content from their platforms. The research includes threats arising from cyberspace, such as terrorism, promotion, recruitment, exploitation, and hate speech, to random email, as the ultimate goal of terrorists is to undermine societies and political systems by generating …

Proactive Scientific Forecasting Of Cyber Threats, Mohamed Badrat

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The cyber globalization has brought about significant transformations in human life. Despite supporting the goals of sustainable development, contributing to the exchange of ideas and beliefs, blending cultures and knowledge, and promoting the trade of goods and services among different peoples of the world, it poses threats to privacy and reduces security. Unethical behaviors and cyber crimes have been prevalent in this widespread and interconnected world, replacing traditional crimes with electronic ones. With the evolution of globalization and technological advancement, cyber threats undermine all avenues of progress and prosperity.

The study adopted a descriptive-analytical methodology to describe and study the …

Criminal Policy To Combat The Spread Of Electronic Rumours (Under Decree-Law No. 34 Of 2021 On Combating Rumours And Cyber Crimes), Ashraf Kandil

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

The UAE's role in combating electronic rumors and reducing its dissemination has been demonstrated by the legislative development of IT crime laws in the UAE. The most recent is the issuance of the Federal Decree-Law No. (34) of 2021 concerning the fight against rumors and cybercrime. Otherwise, the problem of the current study revolves around the flexibility of drafting the procedural texts in order to deal with the constant development of the forms and circumstances of spreading rumors, as well as to indicate their effectiveness in reducing their effects. Therefore, the current study aims to identify the criminal policy to …

Security Strategy In Combating Online Extremist Ideologies In Uae, Khalid Al-Qasimi

Journal of Police and Legal Sciences

This study aims at identifying the role of security strategies; the foundations of correct belief and good upbringing in the face of extremist ideology in order to protect the intellectual security of society. The researcher adopted the descriptive analytical approach in order to describe and analyze the role of the security strategy, the foundations of the correct faith and good upbringing in spreading moderation and combating extremist ideology through electronic websites.

The study has arrived at a number of findings, the most important of which are: extremist ideology cannot be confronted by traditional methods, but must be combated through modern …

Timestamp Estimation From Outdoor Scenes, Tawfiq Salem, Jisoo Hwang, Rafael Padilha

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The increasing availability of smartphones allowed people to easily capture and share images on the internet. These images are often associated with metadata, including the image capture time (timestamp) and the location where the image was captured (geolocation). The metadata associated with images provides valuable information to better understand scenes and events presented in these images. The timestamp can be manipulated intentionally to provide false information to convey a twisted version of reality. Images with manipulated timestamps are often used as a cover-up for wrongdoing or broadcasting false claims and competing views on the internet. Estimating the time of capture …

Anatomy Of An Internet Hijack And Interception Attack: A Global And Educational Perspective, Ben A. Scott, Michael N. Johnstone, Patryk Szewczyk

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

The Internet’s underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure is a rich target for cyber crime, cyber espionage and cyber warfare operations. The stability and security of the Internet infrastructure are important to the function of global matters of state, critical infrastructure, global e-commerce and election systems. There are global approaches to tackle Internet security challenges that include governance, law, educational and technical perspectives. This paper reviews a number of approaches to these challenges, the increasingly surgical attacks that target the underlying vulnerable protocol infrastructure of the Internet, and the extant cyber security education curricula; we find the majority of predominant cyber security …

A Lightweight Reliably Quantified Deepfake Detection Approach, Tianyi Wang, Kam Pui Chow

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Deepfake has brought huge threats to society such that everyone can become a potential victim. Current Deepfake detection approaches have unsatisfactory performance in either accuracy or efficiency. Meanwhile, most models are only evaluated on different benchmark test datasets with different accuracies, which could not imitate the real-life Deepfake unknown population. As Deepfake cases have already been raised and brought challenges at the court, it is disappointed that no existing work has studied the model reliability and attempted to make the detection model act as the evidence at the court. We propose a lightweight Deepfake detection deep learning approach using the …

A Low-Cost Machine Learning Based Network Intrusion Detection System With Data Privacy Preservation, Jyoti Fakirah, Lauhim Mahfuz Zishan, Roshni Mooruth, Michael L. Johnstone, Wencheng Yang

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Network intrusion is a well-studied area of cyber security. Current machine learning-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) monitor network data and the patterns within those data but at the cost of presenting significant issues in terms of privacy violations which may threaten end-user privacy. Therefore, to mitigate risk and preserve a balance between security and privacy, it is imperative to protect user privacy with respect to intrusion data. Moreover, cost is a driver of a machine learning-based NIDS because such systems are increasingly being deployed on resource-limited edge devices. To solve these issues, in this paper we propose a NIDS …

Human-Controlled Fuzzing With Afl, Maxim Grishin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Fuzzing techniques are applied to reveal different types of bugs and vulnerabilities. American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) is a free most popular software fuzzer used by many other fuzzing frameworks. AFL supports autonomous mode of operation that uses the previous step output into the next step, as a result fuzzer spends a lot of time analyzing minor code sections. By making fuzzing process more focused and human controlled security expert can save time and find more bugs in less time. We designed a new module that can fuzz only the specified functions. As a result, the chosen ones will be inspected …

The Amorphous Nature Of Hackers: An Exploratory Study, Kento Yasuhara, Daniel Walnycky, Ibrahim Baggili, Ahmed Alhishwan

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this work, we aim to better understand outsider perspectives of the hacker community through a series of situation based survey questions. By doing this, we hope to gain insight into the overall reputation of hackers from participants in a wide range of technical and non-technical backgrounds. This is important to digital forensics since convicted hackers will be tried by people, each with their own perception of who hackers are. Do cyber crimes and national security issues negatively affect people’s perceptions of hackers? Does hacktivism and information warfare positively affect people’s perception of hackers? Do individual personality factors affect one’s …

Digital Forensics For Mobility As A Service Platform: Analysis Of Uber Application On Iphone And Cloud, Nina Matulis, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Uber is a ride-hailing smartphone application (app) that allows users to order a ride in a highly efficient manner. The Uber app provides Mobility as a Service and allows users to easily order a ride in a private car with just a few clicks. Uber stores large amounts of data on both the mobile device the app is being used on, and in the cloud. Examples of this data include geolocation data, date/time, origin/destination addresses, departure/arrival times, and distance. Uber geolocation data has been previously researched to investigate the privacy of the Uber app; however, there is minimal research relating …

Smart Home Forensics: Identifying Ddos Attack Patterns On Iot Devices, Samuel Ho, Hope Greeson, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smart homes are becoming more common as more people integrate IoT devices into their home environment. As such, these devices have access to personal data on their homeowners’ networks. One of the advantages of IoT devices is that they are compact. However, this limits the incorporation of security measures in their hardware. Misconfigured IoT devices are commonly the target of malicious attacks. Additionally, distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming more common due to applications and software that provides users with easy-to-use user interfaces. Since one vulnerable device is all an attacker needs to launch an attack on a network, in regards …

Microsoft Defender Will Be Defended: Memoryranger Prevents Blinding Windows Av, Denis Pogonin, Igor Korkin, Phd

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Windows OS is facing a huge rise in kernel attacks. An overview of popular techniques that result in loading kernel drivers will be presented. One of the key targets of modern threats is disabling and blinding Microsoft Defender, a default Windows AV. The analysis of recent driver-based attacks will be given, the challenge is to block them. The survey of user- and kernel-level attacks on Microsoft Defender will be given. One of the recently published attackers’ techniques abuses Mandatory Integrity Control (MIC) and Security Reference Monitor (SRM) by modifying Integrity Level and Debug Privileges for the Microsoft Defender via syscalls. …

Detection Of Overlapping Passive Manipulation Techniques In Image Forensics, Gianna S. Lint, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

With a growing number of images uploaded daily to social media sites, it is essential to understand if an image can be used to trace its origin. Forensic investigations are focusing on analyzing images that are uploaded to social media sites resulting in an emphasis on building and validating tools. There has been a strong focus on understanding active manipulation or tampering techniques and building tools for analysis. However, research on manipulation is often studied in a vacuum, involving only one technique at a time. Additionally, less focus has been placed on passive manipulation, which can occur by simply uploading …

Forensic Analysis Of Spy Applications In Android Devices, Shinelle Hutchinson, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Smartphones with Google's Android operating system are becoming more and more popular each year, and with this increased user base, comes increased opportunities to collect more of these users' private data. There have been several instances of malware being made available via the Google Play Store, which is one of the predominant means for users to download applications. One effective way of collecting users' private data is by using Android Spyware. In this paper, we conduct a forensic analysis of a malicious Android spyware application and present our findings. We also highlight what information the application accesses and what it …

Contents, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of Data Erasure Capability On Sshd Drives For Data Recovery, Andrew Blyth

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Data Protection and Computer Forensics/Anti-Forensics has now become a critical area of concern for organizations. A key element to this is how data is sanitized at end of life. In this paper we explore Hybrid Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) and the impact that various Computer Forensics and Data Recovery techniques have when performing data erasure upon a SSHD.

Knowledge Expiration In Security Awareness Training, Tianjian Zhang

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Positive Identification Of Lsb Image Steganography Using Cover Image Comparisons, Michael Pelosi, Nimesh Poudel, Pratap Lamichhane, Devon Lam, Gary Kessler, Joshua Macmonagle

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

In this paper we introduce a new software concept specifically designed to allow the digital forensics professional to clearly identify and attribute instances of LSB image steganography by using the original cover image in side-by-side comparison with a suspected steganographic payload image. The “CounterSteg” software allows detailed analysis and comparison of both the original cover image and any modified image, using sophisticated bit- and color-channel visual depiction graphics. In certain cases, the steganographic software used for message transmission can be identified by the forensic analysis of LSB and other changes in the payload image. The paper demonstrates usage and typical …

Exploring The Use Of Graph Databases To Catalog Artifacts For Client Forensics, Rose Shumba

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Cloud computing has revolutionized the methods by which digital data is stored, processed, and transmitted. It is providing users with data storage and processing services, enabling access to resources through multiple devices. Although organizations continue to embrace the advantages of flexibility and scalability offered by cloud computing, insider threats are becoming a serious concern as cited by security researchers. Insiders can use authorized access to steal sensitive information, calling for the need for an investigation. This concept paper describes research in progress towards developing a Neo4j graph database tool to enhance client forensics. The tool, with a Python interface, allows …

Forensic Analysis Of The Exfat Artifacts, Yves Vandermeer, An Lekhac, Tahar Kechadi, Joe Carthy

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Although keeping some basic concepts inherited from FAT32, the exFAT file system introduces many differences, such as the new mapping scheme of directory entries. The combination of exFAT mapping scheme with the allocation of bitmap files and the use of FAT leads to new forensic possibilities. The recovery of deleted files, including fragmented ones and carving becomes more accurate compared with former forensic processes. Nowadays, the accurate and sound forensic analysis is more than ever needed, as there is a high risk of erroneous interpretation. Indeed, most of the related work in the literature on exFAT structure and forensics, is …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Forensic Investigation Process: Dji Phantom 3 Drone As A Case Study, Alan Roder, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Nhien-A Le-Khac

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Drones (also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAVs) are a potential source of evidence in a digital investigation, partly due to their increasing popularity in our society. However, existing UAV/drone forensics generally rely on conventional digital forensic investigation guidelines such as those of ACPO and NIST, which may not be entirely fit-for-purpose. In this paper, we identify the challenges associated with UAV/drone forensics. We then explore and evaluate existing forensic guidelines, in terms of their effectiveness for UAV/drone forensic investigations. Next, we present our set of guidelines for UAV/drone investigations. Finally, we demonstrate how the proposed guidelines can be …

Detection And Recovery Of Anti-Forensic (Vault) Applications On Android Devices, Michaila Duncan, Umit Karabiyik

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Significant number of mobile device users currently employ anti-forensics applications, also known as vault or locker applications, on their mobile devices in order to hide files such as photos. Because of this, investigators are required to spend a large portion of their time manually looking at the applications installed on the device. Currently, there is no automated method of detecting these anti-forensics applications on an Android device. This work presents the creation and testing of a vault application detection system to be used on Android devices. The main goal of this work is twofold: (i) Detecting and reporting the presence …

Back Matter, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Contents, Adfsl

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Understanding Deleted File Decay On Removable Media Using Differential Analysis, James H. Jones Jr, Anurag Srivastava, Josh Mosier, Connor Anderson, Seth Buenafe

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Digital content created by picture recording devices is often stored internally on the source device, on either embedded or removable media. Such storage media is typically limited in capacity and meant primarily for interim storage of the most recent image files, and these devices are frequently configured to delete older files as necessary to make room for new files. When investigations involve such devices and media, it is sometimes these older deleted files that would be of interest. It is an established fact that deleted file content may persist in part or in its entirety after deletion, and identifying the …