Michael Lesk

The New Front Line: Estonia under Cyberassault

Estonia, although small is a remarkably Web-dependent country, with widespread Internet access, digital identity cards, an 80-percent usage rate for online banking, electronic tax collection, and remote medical monitoring. The DDoS attacks began on the foreign ministers Web site, but spread to all government institutions and key businesses, such as banks. On balance, the Estonian cyberwar ought to be a wake up call. Producing so much disruption for so little money has to be attractive to many groups. We know that people with evil intentions watched what happened; we can only hope that people with good intentions watched as well.

Privacy and Cybersecurity: The Next 100 Years

The past and the future of privacy and cybersecurity are addressed from four perspectives, by different authors: theory and algorithms, technology, policy, and economics. Each author considers the role of the threat from the corresponding perspective, and each adopts an individual tone, ranging from a relatively serious look at the prospects for improvement in underlying theory and algorithms to more lighthearted considerations of the unpredictable futures of policy and economics.

Making a digital library: the contents of the CORE project

The CORE (Chemical Online Retrieval Experiment) project is a library of primary journal articles in chemistry. Any library has an inside and an outside; in this article we describe the inside of the library and the methods for building the system and accumulating the database. A later article will describe the outside (user experiences). Among electronic-library projects, the CORE project is unusual in that it has both ASCII derived from typesetting and image data for all its pages, and among experimental electronic-library projects, it is unusually large. We describe here (a) the processes of scanning and analyzing about 400,000 pages of primary journal material, (b) the conversion of a similar amount of textual database material, (c) the linking of these two data sources, and (d) the indexing of the text material.

Cybersecurity and Economics

Estimates of losses to cybercrime vary widely. In 2010, Internet crime loss by individuals totaled

Big Data, Big Brother, Big Money

560 million. Phishing alone resulted in

How many scientific papers are not original

120 million per quarter. A Symantec-commissioned StrategyOne report found that 65 percent of computer users have spent 28 hours and

New challenges in multimedia research for the increasingly connected and fast growing digital society

300 dealing with cybercrime; McAfee estimated a

Protecting Persons While Protecting the People

1 trillion global cost. A single botnet ring took

Recycling Information: Science Through Data Mining

100 million before the FBI managed to stop it. The UK government estimates that each year the country loses 27 billion to cybercrime, which extrapolated to the US population and converted to dollars would be approximately

Digital Rights Management and Individualized Pricing

210 billion. The UKs response will be 650 million for cybersecurity. A few years ago, Consumer Reports gave a relatively low number for US cybercrime loss-