Sitalakshmi Venkatraman

Biometrics in banking security: a case study

Purpose – To identify and discuss the issues and success factors surrounding biometrics, especially in the context of user authentication and controls in the banking sector, using a case study.Design/methodology/approach – The literature survey and analysis of the security models of the present information systems and biometric technologies in the banking sector provide the theoretical and practical background for this work. The impact of adopting biometric solutions in banks was analysed by considering the various issues and challenges from technological, managerial, social and ethical angles. These explorations led to identifying the success factors that serve as possible guidelines for a viable implementation of a biometric‐enabled authentication system in banking organisations, in particular for a major bank in New Zealand.Findings – As the level of security breaches and transaction frauds increase day by day, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification information systems is b...

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.

Role of mobile technology in the construction industry – a case study

The construction industry is facing a number of pressures to decrease costs, improve productivity and have a competitive edge in terms of quality of service and customer satisfaction. Recent advancements in mobile technology provide new avenues for addressing this situation. This paper presents the role of emerging mobile technologies and, in particular, the development of a mobile facsimile solution that assists collaborative communications between parties on or away from the construction site. This paper first identifies potential use cases for mobile technologies in the construction industry and highlights the issues that would hamper their adoption. It discusses the modelling of the problems related to the workflow of a construction process with the aid of a focus group formed with various construction industry representatives in New Zealand. The various problem-solving processes adopted by the industry practitioners at different functional levels are analysed and the findings summarised. Finally, this paper describes the development of one such mobile solution, called ClikiFax, which could address some of the issues and pressures prevailing in the context of the New Zealand construction industry.

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...

MapReduce neural network framework for efficient content based image retrieval from large datasets in the cloud

Recently, content based image retrieval (CBIR) has gained active research focus due to wide applications such as crime prevention, medicine, historical research and digital libraries. With digital explosion, image collections in databases in distributed locations over the Internet pose a challenge to retrieve images that are relevant to user queries efficiently and accurately. It becomes increasingly important to develop new CBIR techniques that are effective and scalable for real-time processing of very large image collections. To address this, the paper proposes a novel MapReduce neural network framework for CBIR from large data collection in a cloud environment. We adopt natural language queries that use a fuzzy approach to classify the colour images based on their content and apply Map and Reduce functions that can operate in cloud clusters for arriving at accurate results in real-time. Preliminary experimental results for classifying and retrieving images from large data sets were quite convincing to carry out further experimental evaluations.

Detecting malicious behaviour using supervised learning algorithms of the function calls

This paper describes our research in evaluating the use of supervised data mining algorithms for an effective detection of zero-day malware. Our aim is to design the tasks of certain popular types of supervised data mining algorithms for zero-day malware detection and compare their performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In this context, we propose and evaluate a novel method of employing such data mining techniques based on the frequency of Windows function calls. Our experimental investigations using large data sets to train the classifiers with a design tool to compare the performance of various data mining algorithms. Analysis of the results suggests the advantages of one data mining algorithm over the other for malware detection. Overall, data mining algorithms are employed with true positive rate as high as 98.5%, and low false positive rate of less than 0.025, indicating good applicability and future enhancements for detecting unknown and infected files with embedded stealthy malcode.

Relationships among triple bottom line elements

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to gain more insight of the nature and strength of relationships among the three triple bottom line (TBL) outcomes, namely corporate environmental performance outcome (CEPO), corporate social performance outcome (CSPO) and corporate financial performance outcome (CFPO) and to evolve a roadmap for integrating sustainable business practices that facilitates in managing and improving their sustainable performance. Literature reports that currently businesses try to achieve economic, social and ecological goals independently resulting in silos. The interrelationships of TBL elements have not been explored and integrated. The literature has already pointed out that to achieve corporate sustainability, managers need to integrate TBL goals in all their business decisions. However, the question remains – how to integrate these three competing goals and this paper attempts to answer this question. Design/methodology/approach – In the research design, the authors use a quantit...

The development of an information systems strategic plan: an e-government perspective

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have been playing a major role in governments across the world to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of public services. However, ICT has been utilised only in a piecemeal fashion by different public sectors and, hence, many governments are keen to incorporate an integrated e-government strategy to achieve business and service excellence. This paper presents the development of an Information Systems Strategic Plan (ISSP) for a large government organisation as a case study. We discuss the evolution of an e-government strategy and examine its influence in the development of an information systems strategy within a state sector organisation in New Zealand. The findings from the case study analysis are used to measure the degree of alignment between the objectives of the e-government strategy and the organisations ISSP strategy. We identify the challenges that face the organisation and propose a ten-point framework for the improvement of the ISSP alignment with the e-government strategy. Finally, we conclude with a summary of the outcomes of this study and the future research directions.

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.

A Hybrid Wrapper-Filter Approach for Malware Detection

This paper presents an efficient and novel approach for malware detection. The proposed approach uses a hybrid wrapper-filter model for malware feature selection, which combines Maximum Relevance (MR) filter heuristics and Artificial Neural Net Input Gain Measurement Approximation (ANNIGMA) wrapper heuristic for sub-set selection by capitalizing on each classifier’s strengths. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it injects the intrinsic characteristics of data obtained by the filter into the wrapper stage and combines this with wrapper’s heuristic score. This in turn can reduce the search space and guide the search for the most significant malware features that assist in detection. Extensive cross-validated experimental investigations on actual malware datasets were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The model was compared with several existing models including independent wrapper and filter approaches. The results of the model’s performance on both obfuscated malware as well as benign datasets showed that the proposed hybrid MRANNIGMA model out-performed the independent filter and wrapper approaches by achieving the highest accuracy of 97%. Furthermore, this hybrid model improved execution time by using a more compact set of operation code features, and also reduced the rate of false positives.