Iosif Androulidakis

Perspectives of mobile advertising in Greek market

It is a fact that with the arrival of 3rd generation networks, the potential services that can be provided through mobile devices will be numerous. The market will eventually start to work the potentials of mobile business. Companies will quickly take advantage of these. An interesting mobile business service is mobile advertising. The question is how ready is the Greek market to welcome this new service and how Greek companies should position themselves in this new aspect. The present paper tries to answer this question. The answer to this question seems to stem from the clients-subscribers of mobile operators. The objective of this particular research is the opinion of young subscribers of mobile operators about mobile advertising. In other words, how familiar are they with mobile advertising, whether they are annoyed by receiving mobile advertising messages, what kind of advertisements they would like to receive in their mobile phone etc. The research method that was used was the structured survey research with a tick boxes questionnaire that was addressed to young subscribers who study in the University of Ioannina and are aged between 18 and 24.

A Survey on Saving Personal Data in the Mobile Phone

Modern smart phones have provided users countless opportunities to access, process and store data in various ways and formats. Inevitably, the user himself has started storing personal data too in the mobile phone. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the practice of saving personal data in mobile phones. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. These results can help both academia and industry focus their security awareness campaigns and efforts to specific subsets of users that mostly need them. Finally, as there are not available any already validated questionnaires in regards to this specific research topic, our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

A plain type of mobile attack: Compromise of user’s privacy through a simple implementation method

An easy way to determine the state of a cell phone without the ownerpsilas knowledge is presented in this paper. The described method, combined with a form of patterning mobile userpsilas behavior (in terms of evaluating the mobile phonepsilas state in a tactical way) could lead to privacy compromise revealing his whereabouts. The technical part of the paper is based on the Short Messaging Service and the offered service of Receipt Report, manipulated in such a way as not to reveal any information to the targeted user. In addition, this method can provide known plain texts for an attack on A5.

Spam goes mobile: Filtering unsolicited SMS traffic

The wide proliferation of mobile devices has attracted the attention of cyber-criminals, who exploit their functionality for malevolent purposes. One of the most popular approaches is the exploitation of sms for generating unsolicited electronic messages, also known as spam. The paper describes the peculiarities of the mobile unsolicited message traffic and proposes an sms spam detection algorithm for mobile devices. The developed prototype can be quite an effective method for fighting SMS spam.

A crowdsourcing approach to protect against novel malware threats

Worm attacks for more than two decades have been affecting the Internet causing instability and economic loses. In a huge pool of possible victims such as the Internet there can exist many targets running the same software with the same vulnerabilities. To prevent such targets from getting infected one can use the crowd experience to identify a possible attack and restrict the use of possible vulnerable software for a certain period. Crowdsourcing intelligence or collaborative intelligence is the power of many when each one in a group of participants shares certain information. It is characterized by enhancing information accuracy which further improves decision making on the group. This paper presents and analyzes NetBuckler, a collaborative client application which employs collaborative intelligence to defend against Internet worms. It also briefly presents JXTA and its potential.

Smart phone users: Are they green users?

Smart phones by now have overwhelmed the mobile phone market, to the point that it becomes increasingly difficult to find an “old-type”, classical, feature phone. Although they offer a wealth of features and services to their users, they are far more power hungry, requiring to be charged almost daily! At the same time many interesting questions arise, in regards to their users: Are they aware of green practices? Do they follow them? In this work, using quantitative statistics and Fuzzy Decision Tree analysis we will present the preliminary findings from an empirical study among 313 users that was held in order to answer all these questions. We proposed a Fuzzy Decision Rules based on this data.

Feeling Secure vs. Being Secure the Mobile Phone User Case

In this work, we are comparing the subjective security feeling of mobile phone users to the (objectively agreed) best security practices. This was possible by statistically processing a large pool of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 European countries. We introduced a “mean actual security value”, comparing their security practices to best practices. There was a clear negative connection between feeling secure and actually being secure. Users that feel that mobile phone communication is secure, tend to be less cautious in their security practices. Moreover, we extracted profiles of students according to their mobile phone communication security feeling. These profiles belong to well defined categories. Users, exhibit different values of a metric that we named “mean security feeling value” according to their age, field of study, brand and operating system of phone, connection type, monthly bill and backup frequency. These results can help both academia and industry focus their security awareness campaigns and efforts to specific subsets of users that mostly need them. Finally, as there are not available any already validated questionnaires in regards to this specific research topic, our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

Ramifications of mobile phone advanced O/S on security perceptions and practices

The present paper correlates advanced operating systems (O/S) in mobile phones to the security perceptions and practices of users. It is based upon the results of a survey that took place in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries. 7172 questionnaires were gathered and processed with the results showing that there is a statistically significant connection between the type of the phones O/S (advanced or not) and the security feeling, awareness and practices of users. Users of advanced O/S believe they are more informed and feel more secure (both statistically proved). Unfortunately, even though they subjectively feel informed, their actual objective score in regards to awareness questions is lower than that of non advanced O/S users, while their actual security behavior, is just slightly better than that of other users. This false sense of security and awareness renders them more vulnerable than others. In any case, the overall percentages reveal general lack of awareness and moderate attention to security issues, with some even alarming findings. As such, the need for security education, combined with transparent security features in the phones is apparent. Furthermore, in regards to this specific research topic, there are not available any already validated questionnaires. Our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

Classification of EEG signals using feature creation produced by grammatical evolution

A state-of-the-art method based on a grammatical evolution approach is utilized in this study to classify EEG signals. The method is able to construct nonlinear mappings of the original features in order to improve their effectiveness when used as input into artificial intelligence techniques. Several features are initially extracted from the EEG signals which are subsequently used to create the non-linear mappings. Then, a classification stage is applied, using multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis functions (RBF), to categorize the EEG signals. The proposed method is evaluated using a benchmark epileptic EEG dataset and promising results are reported.

Mobile Phone Downloading among Students: The Status and Its Effect on Security

Mobile Internet is steadily gaining momentum allowing users to browse the World Wide Web from their mobile phones, downloading at the same time applications and games. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the state of mobile downloading penetration in the student population. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. Namely, users actively downloading are only 37% of the student population and are mostly concentrated in older student ages. In addition, their actual behavior in regards to security practices is generally better than that of other users, especially for those that mainly download applications. As it was found, students with lower monthly bills do not know if their mobile phone has the ability to download software. Thus, by enhancing their knowledge, operators will profit by increased mobile downloading while users will enjoy better services.