Moutaz Alazab

Analysis of malicious and benign android applications

Since its establishment, the Android applications market has been infected by a proliferation of malicious applications. Recent studies show that rogue developers are injecting malware into legitimate market applications which are then installed on open source sites for consumer uptake. Often, applications are infected several times. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of malicious Android applications, we present a simple and effective way to safely execute and analyze them. As part of this analysis, we use the Android application sandbox Droidbox to generate behavioral graphs for each sample and these provide the basis of the development of patterns to aid in identifying it. As a result, we are able to determine if family names have been correctly assigned by current anti-virus vendors. Our results indicate that the traditional anti-virus mechanisms are not able to correctly identify malicious Android applications.

Cybercrime: The Case of Obfuscated Malware

Cybercrime has rapidly developed in recent years and malware is one of the major security threats in computer which have been in existence from the very early days. There is a lack of understanding of such malware threats and what mechanisms can be used in implementing security prevention as well as to detect the threat. The main contribution of this paper is a step towards addressing this by investigating the different techniques adopted by obfuscated malware as they are growingly widespread and increasingly sophisticated with zero-day exploits. In particular, by adopting certain effective detection methods our investigations show how cybercriminals make use of file system vulnerabilities to inject hidden malware into the system. The paper also describes the recent trends of Zeus botnets and the importance of anomaly detection to be employed in addressing the new Zeus generation of malware.

Towards an understanding of the impact of advertising on data leaks

Recent investigations have determined that many Android applications in both official and non-official online markets expose details of the users mobile phone without user consent. In this paper, for the first time in the research literature, we provide a full investigation of why such applications leak, how they leak and where the data is leaked to. In order to achieve this, we employ a combination of static and dynamic analysis based on examination of Java classes and application behaviour for a data set of 123 samples, all pre-determined as being free from malicious software. Despite the fact that anti-virus vendor software did not flag any of these samples as malware, approximately 10% of them are shown to leak data about the mobile phone to a third-party; applications from the official market appear to be just as susceptible to such leaks as applications from the non-official markets.

Performance evaluation of e-government services using balanced scorecard: an empirical study in Jordan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to emphasise on a balance between quantitative and qualitative measures, and examine the use of Balanced Scorecard to evaluate and estimate the performance of information and communication technologies (ICT) in delivering valuable e‐government services through the internet.Design/methodology/approach – This study tests the hypotheses of e‐government effectiveness using Balanced Scorecard technique by incorporating qualitative measures within a quantitative research methodology with data collected by means of a survey questionnaire. The survey sample of 383 stakeholders includes common customers, employees of e‐government, and employees from the IT sector. The survey data were analysed to test the hypothesis in measuring e‐government effectiveness from Balanced Scorecards four dimensions: customer perspective, financial perspective, internal business process perspective, and innovation and learning perspective.Findings – The results show that the Balanced Scorecard f...

Using feature selection for intrusion detection system

A good intrusion system gives an accurate and efficient classification results. This ability is an essential functionality to build an intrusion detection system. In this paper, we focused on using various training functions with feature selection to achieve high accurate results. The data we used in our experiments are NSL-KDD. However, the training and testing time to build the model is very high. To address this, we proposed feature selection based on information gain, which can contribute to detect several attack types with high accurate result and low false rate. Moreover, we performed experiments to classify each of the five classes (normal, probe, denial of service (DoS), user to super-user (U2R), and remote to local (R2L). Our proposed outperform other state-of-art methods.

Six Sigma Approach to Improve Quality in E-Services: An Empirical Study in Jordan

This paper investigates the application of the Six Sigma approach to improve quality in electronic services e-services as more countries are adopting e-services as a means of providing services to their people through the Web. This paper presents a case study about the use of Six Sigma model to measure customer satisfaction and quality levels achieved in e-services that were recently launched by public sector organisations in a developing country, such as Jordan. An empirical study consisting of 280 customers of Jordans e-services is conducted and problems are identified through the DMAIC phases of Six Sigma. The service quality levels are measured and analysed using six main criteria: Website Design, Reliability, Responsiveness, Personalization, Information Quality, and System Quality. The study indicates a 74% customer satisfaction with a Six Sigma level of 2.12 has enabled the Greater Amman Municipality to identify the usability issues associated with their e-services offered by public sector organisations. The aim of the paper is not only to implement Six Sigma as a measurement-based strategy for improving e-customer service in a newly launched e-service programme, but also widen its scope in investigating other service dimensions and perform comparative studies in other developing countries.

Smartphone Applications, Malware and Data Theft

The growing popularity of smartphone devices has led to development of increasing numbers of applications which have subsequently become targets for malicious authors. Analysing applications in order to identify malicious ones is a current major concern in information security; an additional problem connected with smart-phone applications is that their many advertising libraries can lead to loss of personal information. In this paper, we relate the current methods of detecting malware on smartphone devices and discuss the problems caused by malware as well as advertising.