A framework for data privacy and security accountability in data breach communications
- Authors: Thomas, Louise , Gondal, Iqbal , Oseni, Taiwo , Firmin, Sally
- Date: 2022
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Computers and Security Vol. 116, no. (2022), p.
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- Description: Organisations need to take steps to protect the privacy and security of the personal information they hold. However, when data is breached, how do individuals know whether the organisation took reasonable steps to protect their data? When breached organisations notify affected individuals, this communication is likely to be one of the few windows into the incident from the outside and can become an important artefact for research. This desktop study aimed to consider the extent to which publicly available Australian data breach communications reflect data privacy and security best practices. This paper presents a brief review of literature and government guidance on data security and privacy best practices, along with the results of a qualitative content analysis of 33 publicly available Australian data breach communications. This analysis illustrated that there was little reflection of data privacy and security practices. Literature, government guidance and the content analysis were used to inform and develop a new voluntary framework for organisations. This consists of a series of evaluation questions divided into two broad categories: responsible data management and responsible portrayal of the breach. The framework has the potential to help organisations plan the inclusion of data privacy and security management aspects in their data breach communications. This could assist organisations to address their legal and ethical responsibility to account for their actions in managing privacy and security of the personal data they hold. © 2022
Vulnerability modelling for hybrid industrial control system networks
- Authors: Ur-Rehman, Attiq , Gondal, Iqbal , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Jolfaei, Alireza
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Grid Computing Vol. 18, no. 4 (2020), p. 863-878
- Full Text: false
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- Description: With the emergence of internet-based devices, the traditional industrial control system (ICS) networks have evolved to co-exist with the conventional IT and internet enabled IoT networks, hence facing various security challenges. The IT industry around the world has widely adopted the common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) as an industry standard to numerically evaluate the vulnerabilities in software systems. This mathematical score of vulnerabilities is combined with environmental knowledge to determine the vulnerable nodes and attack paths. IoT and ICS systems have unique dynamics and specific functionality as compared to traditional computer networks, and therefore, the legacy cyber security models would not fit these advanced networks. In this paper, we studied the CVSS v3.1 framework’s application to ICS embedded networks and an improved vulnerability framework, named CVSSIoT-ICS, is proposed. CVSSIoT-ICS and CVSS v3.1 are applied to a realistic supply chain hybrid network which consists of IT, IoT, and ICS nodes. This hybrid network is assigned with actual vulnerabilities listed in the national vulnerability database (NVD). The comparison results confirm the effectiveness of CVSSIoT-ICS framework as it is equally applicable to all nodes of a hybrid network and evaluates the vulnerabilities based on the distinct features of each node type. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.
A novel ensemble of hybrid intrusion detection system for detecting internet of things attacks
- Authors: Khraisat, Ansam , Gondal, Iqbal , Vamplew, Peter , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Alazab, Ammar
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Electronics (Switzerland) Vol. 8, no. 11 (2019), p.
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- Description: The Internet of Things (IoT) has been rapidly evolving towards making a greater impact on everyday life to large industrial systems. Unfortunately, this has attracted the attention of cybercriminals who made IoT a target of malicious activities, opening the door to a possible attack to the end nodes. Due to the large number and diverse types of IoT devices, it is a challenging task to protect the IoT infrastructure using a traditional intrusion detection system. To protect IoT devices, a novel ensemble Hybrid Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) is proposed by combining a C5 classifier and One Class Support Vector Machine classifier. HIDS combines the advantages of Signature Intrusion Detection System (SIDS) and Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (AIDS). The aim of this framework is to detect both the well-known intrusions and zero-day attacks with high detection accuracy and low false-alarm rates. The proposed HIDS is evaluated using the Bot-IoT dataset, which includes legitimate IoT network traffic and several types of attacks. Experiments show that the proposed hybrid IDS provide higher detection rate and lower false positive rate compared to the SIDS and AIDS techniques. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Robust malware defense in industrial IoT applications using machine learning with selective adversarial samples
- Authors: Khoda, Mahbub , Imam, Tasadduq , Kamruzzaman, Joarder , Gondal, Iqbal , Rahman, Ashfaqur
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications Vol.56, no 4. (2020), p. 4415-4424
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- Description: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deploys edge devices to act as intermediaries between sensors and actuators and application servers or cloud services. Machine learning models have been widely used to thwart malware attacks in such edge devices. However, these models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks where attackers craft adversarial samples by introducing small perturbations to malware samples to fool a classifier to misclassify them as benign applications. Literature on deep learning networks proposes adversarial retraining as a defense mechanism where adversarial samples are combined with legitimate samples to retrain the classifier. However, existing works select such adversarial samples in a random fashion which degrades the classifier's performance. This work proposes two novel approaches for selecting adversarial samples to retrain a classifier. One, based on the distance from malware cluster center, and the other, based on a probability measure derived from a kernel based learning (KBL). Our experiments show that both of our sample selection methods outperform the random selection method and the KBL selection method improves detection accuracy by 6%. Also, while existing works focus on deep neural networks with respect to adversarial retraining, we additionally assess the impact of such adversarial samples on other classifiers and our proposed selective adversarial retraining approaches show similar performance improvement for these classifiers as well. The outcomes from the study can assist in designing robust security systems for IIoT applications.