Since 2000, the southern Israeli town of Sderot and a neighboring rural region, Otef Aza, have been frequently exposed to nearly identical terror attacks by Hamas. While only a small minority of Otef Aza residents have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), more than a third of Sderot residents have been diagnosed with PTSD. Factors such as social cohesion and ideology may be the unique factors that protect Otef Aza kibbutzim residents from PTSD; however, a gap in the literature exists as to how these same factors might affect PTSD symptomology in Sderot residents. Orthodox religiosity has also been associated with reduced PTSD symptoms in Sderot; however, previous research on religiosity has analyzed demographic characteristics and did not use a measure assessing dimensions of religiosity. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the impact of sense of community, ideology, and religiosity on PTSD symptoms among Sderot residents. The theoretical foundation of this study was the diathesis-stress model of PTSD. A survey was completed by a convenience sample of Sderot residents (n = 118). Standard multiple linear regression revealed that ideology, intrinsic religiosity, nonorganizational religious activity, and the fulfillment of needs dimension of sense of community were significant predictors of PTSD symptomatology. Study findings suggested protective factors which could help a large portion of the population. These findings have implications for positive social change for the residents of Sderot by enhancing their opportunities for increased positive interactions, well-being, and meaning and value in their lives.

This thesis explores the use of applied machine learning techniques to augment traditional methods of identifying and preventing web-based attacks. Several factors complicate the identification of web-based attacks. The first is the scale of the web. The amount of data on the web and the heterogeneous nature of this data complicate efforts to distinguish between benign sites and attack sites. Second, an attacker may duplicate their attack at multiple, unexpected locations (multiple URLs spread across different domains) with ease. Third, attacks can be hosted nearly anonymously; there is little cost or risk associated with hosting or publishing a web-based attack. In combination, these factors lead one to conclude that, currently, the webs threat landscape is unfavorably tilted towards the attacker. To counter these advantages this thesis describes our novel solutions to web se- curity problems. The common theme running through our work is the demonstration that we can detect attacks missed by other security tools as well as detecting attacks sooner than other security responses. To illustrate this, we describe the development of BayeShield, a browser-based tool capable of successfully identifying phishing at- tacks in the wild. Progressing from specific to a more general approach, we next focus on the detection of obfuscated scripts (one of the most commonly used tools in web-based attacks). Finally, we present TopSpector, a system we've designed to forecast malicious activity prior to it's occurrence. We demonstrate that by mining Top-Level DNS data we can produce a candidate set of domains that contains up to 65% of domains that will be blacklisted. Furthermore, on average TopSpector flags malicious domains 32 days before they are blacklisted, allowing the security community ample time to investigate these domains before they host malicious activity.

<p>The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is the most widely used cellular technology in the world. Approximately 800 million people around the world are using GSM for different purposes, but mostly for voice communication and SMS. For GSM, like many other widely used systems, security is crucial. The security involves mechanisms used to protect the different shareholders, like subscribers and service providers. The aspects of security that this report covers are mainly anonymity, authentication and confidentiality. </p><p>The important aspects of the system that need protection are described, along with the implementation of mechanisms used for the protection. It appears that many of the very valuable aspects of GSM can be attacked. </p><p>The anonymity of a GSM user is compromised resulting in the attacker being able to observe the time, rate, length, sources or destinations of e g calls. Even tracking a subscriber’s movements becomes possible. However, a passive attack is not sufficient to perform these attacks. The attacker needs to mount an active attack using equipment offering base station functionality. </p><p>Authentication is a crucial aspect of a wireless communication system due to the nature of the medium used, i e the radio link that is available to every one and not only the legitimate entities. Even the authentication mechanisms are attacked. It is possible to clone a subscription either by having physical access to the smart card or over the air interface. Cloning a subscription over the air requires base station functionality. </p><p>The most obvious threat against communication systems is eavesdropping on conversations. The privacy of GSM conversations is protected using some version of the A5 algorithm. There are several impressive cryptanalytical attacks against these algorithms, that break the encryption and make it possible to eavesdrop in real-time. Most of these algorithms require, however, extensive computation power and unrealistic quantities of known plaintext, which make it difficult to use them in practice. Difficulties using cryptanalytical attacks to break the confidentiality of GSM calls does not mean that conversations are well protected. Loopholes in the protocols used in GSM make it possible for an outsider, with access to sufficient equipment, to eavesdrop on conversations in real-time. </p><p>In the presence of these threats and vulnerabilities it is justified to wonder whether GSM provides sufficient security for users with very valuable information to communicate. These users may be military organisations, senior management personnel in large companies etc. GSM’s current security model does note provide sufficient protection for these entities. An additional layer of security should be added to the current security model.</p>

<p>More money nowadays moves online and it is very understandable that criminals want to make more money online aswell, because these days’ banks don’t have large sums of money in their cash box. Since there are many other internalrisks involved in robbing a bank, criminals have found many other ways to commit crimes and much lower risMore money nowadays moves online and it is very understandable that criminals want to make more money online as well, because these days’ banks don’t have large sums of money in their cash box. Since there are many other internal risks involved in robbing a bank, criminals have found many other ways to commit crimes and much lower risk in online crime. The first level of change involved was email-based phishing, but later circumstances changed again.</p><p>Authentication methods and security of online bank has been improved over the period. This will drastically reduce effects of phishing based on emails and fraudulent website. The next level of online bank fraud is called banking Trojans. These Trojans infect the online customers of banks. These Trojans monitors customer’s activities and uses their authenticated session to steal customers’ money.</p><p>A lot of money is made by these kinds of attacks. Comparatively few perpetrators have been caught, and the problem is getting worse day by day. To have a better understanding of this problem, I have selected a recent malware sample named as SilentBanker. It had the capability of attacking more than 400 banks. This thesis presents the problem in general and includes my results in studying the behaviour of the SilentBanker Trojan.</p>

Memory errors are a common cause of incorrect software execution and security vulnerabilities. We have developed two new techniques that help software continue to execute successfully through memory errors: failure-oblivious computing and boundless memory blocks. The foundation of both techniques is a compiler that generates code that checks accesses via pointers to detect out of bounds accesses. Instead of terminating or throwing an exception, the generated code takes another action that keeps the program executing without memory corruption. Failure-oblivious code simply discards invalid writes and manufactures values to return for invalid reads, enabling the program to continue its normal execution path. Code that implements boundless memory blocks stores invalid writes away in a hash table to return as the values for corresponding out of bounds reads. he net effect is to (conceptually) give each allocated memory block unbounded size and to eliminate out of bounds accesses as a programming error. We have implemented both techniques and acquired several widely used open source servers (Apache, Sendmail, Pine, Mutt, and Midnight Commander).With standard compilers, all of these servers are vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks as documented at security tracking web sites. Both failure-oblivious computing and boundless memory blocks eliminate these security vulnerabilities (as well as other memory errors). Our results show that our compiler enables the servers to execute successfully through buffer overflow attacks to continue to correctly service user requests without security vulnerabilities. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Joel Best, Dept. of Sociology. Includes bibliographical references.

Project (D. Min.)--Iliff School of Theology, 2006. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-123; 126-146).

The success of the Internet has brought significant changes to the telecommunication industry. One of the remarkable outcomes of this evolution is Voice over IP (VoIP), which enables realtime voice communications over packet switched networks for a lower cost than traditional public switched telephone networks (PSTN). Nevertheless, security and privacy vulnerabilities pose a significant challenge to hindering VoIP from being widely deployed. The main object of this thesis is to define and elaborate unexplored security and privacy risks on standardized VoIP protocols and their implementations as well as to develop suitable countermeasures. Three research questions are addressed to achieve this objective: Question 1:  What are potential unexplored threats in a SIP VoIP network with regard to availability, confidentiality and privacy by means of unwanted traffic and information disclosure? Question 2:  How far are existing security and privacy mechanisms sufficient to counteract these threats and what are their shortcomings? Question 3:  How can new countermeasures be designed for minimizing or preventing the consequences caused by these threats efficiently in practice? Part I of the thesis concentrates on the threats caused by "unwanted traffic", which includes Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and voice spam. They generate unwanted traffic to consume the resources and annoy users. Part II of this thesis explores unauthorized information disclosure in VoIP traffic. Confidential user data such as calling records, identity information, PIN code and data revealing a user's social networks might be disclosed or partially disclosed from VoIP traffic. We studied both threats and countermeasures by conducting experiments or using theoretical assessment. Part II also presents a survey research related to threats and countermeasures for anonymous VoIP communication.

This thesis focuses on video watermarking robust against geometric attacks and video compressions. In addition to the requirements for an image watermarking algorithm, a digital video watermarking algorithm has to be robust against advanced video compressions, frame loss, frame swapping, aspect ratio change, frame rate change, intra- and inter-frame filtering, etc. Video compression, especially, the most efficient compression standard, H.264, and geometric attacks, such as rotation and cropping, frame aspect ratio change, and translation, are considered the most challenging attacks for video watermarking algorithms. In this thesis, we first review typical watermarking algorithms robust against geometric attacks and video compressions, and point out their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we propose our robust video watermarking algorithms against Rotation, Scaling and Translation (RST) attacks and MPEG-2 compression based on the logpolar mapping and the phase-only filtering method. Rotation or scaling transformation in the spatial domain results in vertical or horizontal shift in the log-polar mapping (LPM) of the magnitude of the Fourier spectrum of the target frame. Translation has no effect in this domain. This method is very robust to RST attacks and MPEG-2 compression. We also demonstrate that this method can be used as a RST parameters detector to work with other watermarking algorithms to improve their robustness to RST attacks. Furthermore, we propose a new video watermarking algorithm based on the 1D DFT (one-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform) and 1D projection. This algorithm enhances the robustness to video compression and is able to resist the most advanced video compression, H.264. The 1D DFT for a video sequence along the temporal domain generates an ideal domain, in which the spatial information is still kept and the temporal information is obtained. With detailed analysis and calculation, we choose the frames with highest temporal frequencies to embed the fence-shaped watermark pattern in the Radon transform domain of the selected frames. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by video compression standards MPEG-2 and H.264; geometric attacks such as rotation, translation, and aspect-ratio changes; and other video processing. The most important advantages of this video watermarking algorithm are its simplicity, practicality and robustness.

A literature search, in addition to expert survey, was performed to estimate the size and burden of panic disorder in the European Union (EU). Epidemiologic data from EU countries were critically reviewed to determine the consistency of prevalence estimates across studies and to identify the most pressing questions for future research. A comprehensive literature search focusing on epidemiological studies in community and clinical settings in European countries since 1980 was conducted (Medline, Web of Science, Psychinfo). Only studies using established diagnostic instruments on the basis of DSM-III-R or DSM-IV, or ICD-10 were considered. Thirteen studies from a total of 14 countries were identified. Epidemiological findings are relatively consistent across the EU. The 12-month prevalence of panic disorder and agoraphobia without history of panic were estimated to be 1.8% (0.7–2.2) and 1.3% (0.7–2.0) respectively across studies. Rates are twice as high in females and age of first onset for both disorders is in adolescence or early adulthood. In addition to comorbidity with agoraphobia, panic disorder is strongly associated with other anxiety disorders, and a wide range of somatoform, affective and substance use disorders. Even subclinical forms of panic disorder (i.e., panic attacks) are associated with substantial distress, psychiatric comorbidity and functional impairment. In general health primary care settings, there appears to be substantial underdiagnosis and undertreatment of panic disorder. Moreover, panic disorder and agoraphobia are poorly recognized and rarely treated in mental health settings, despite high health care utilization rates and substantial long-term disability.