Information Technology

In this paper we present CAT Record – a real time
computer forensics agent that records computer activity for
subsequent forensic investigation on a Windows computer system
as actions are taking place on a system. This approach is different
from the traditional post-mortem approach of examining a hard
disk since activities are being recorded as they are happening.
The prototype agent included six modules 1) Windows Event
Watcher - which records the Windows Operating System events
2) Active Window Detector - which records the active windows
on the screen 3) Font-Time-Power-Resolution Detector - which
records changes in font, time, power or resolution on the system
4) Explorers Monitor - which records the activity when opening
an item from the Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer 5)
Removable Devices Detector - which records any external devices
that are plugged in or removed from a system and 6) File System
Watcher - which records the activity taking place on the file
system. CAT Record was stress tested in three scenarios using an
automated program that was written to test the accuracy of the
agent and its memory consumption on Windows XP and
Windows 7. Overall, the results indicated that the amount of
recorded data varied between Windows XP and Windows 7 and
that CAT Record on average did not consume more than 42,876
KB of memory per second during its operation under extremely
stressful tests.

Educated and trained people are critical success factor in any IT work environment to minimize threats or misuse of the organizational assets that may damage the growth, excellence, and efficiency of any business. However, humans are always the weakest point in any security plan. Awareness is by far the most successful technique that does not cost much when compared with training and education and may reduce the total expenditure on security. Having a properly planned information security awareness program greatly impact the raising of the awareness level among the organization’s staff. Information Technology unit represents a critical success factor in knowledge management and plays a major role in the decision-making process within any organization. We assess that the initial step in delivering any security awareness plan to the business should start from within IT unit, and this is aligned with the perception that security is the sole responsibility of the IT department. Most of the former studies proposed general information security awareness programs and guidelines, but few of them targeted IT unit. The purpose of this research is to propose an information security awareness program (ISAP) to be used by IT unit to enhance the level of information security standard regardless of the organization type. Our research study differs from other studies in that we targeted the IT unit when building ISAP. Furthermore, we identify several awareness knowledge areas for each sub-division.

In this paper, we present LiFE (Logical iOS Forensics Examiner), an open source iOS backup forensics examination tool. This tool helps both researchers and practitioners alike in both understanding the backup structures of iOS devices and forensically examining iOS backups. The tool is currently capable of parsing device information, call history, voice messages, GPS locations, conversations, notes, images, address books, calendar entries, SMS messages, Aux locations, facebook data and e-mails. The tool consists of both a manual interface (where the user is able to manually examine the backup structures) and an automated examination interface (where the tool pulls out evidence from known files). Additionally, LiFE is designed so that the evidence located in files would retain its integrity. It is important to note that most of the evidence examined by LiFE is parsed from SQLite databases that are backed up by iTunes. LiFE also offers an extensibility option to the user, where an exa...

This paper discusses the use of context in Web services personalization. The objective of personalization is to accommodate user preferences, which are of different types varying from when the execution of a Web service should start to where the outcome of this execution should be delivered. Besides user preferences, computing resources on which the Web services operate have an impact

In this paper, a new hybrid metaheuristic learning algorithm is introduced to choose the best parameters for the multi-criteria decision making algorithm (MCDA) called PROAFTN. PROAFTN requires values of several parameters to be determined prior to classification. These parameters include boundaries of intervals and relative weights for each attribute. The proposed learning algorithm , identified as PSOPRO-RVNS as it integrates particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Reduced Variable Neighborhood Search (RVNS), is used to automatically determine all PROAFTN parameters. The combination of PSO with RVNS allows to improve the exploration and exploitation capabilities of PSO by setting some search points to be iteratively re-exploited using RVNS. Based on the generated results, experimental evaluations show that PSOPRO-RVNS outperforms six well-known machine learning classifiers in a variety of problems.