Malicious User Experience Design Research for Cybersecurity

This paper explores the factors and theory behind the user-centered research that is necessary to create a successful game-like prototype, and user experience, for malicious users in a cybersecurity context. We explore what is known about successful addictive design in the fields of video games and gambling to understand the allure of breaking into a system, and the joy of thwarting the security to reach a goal or a reward of data. Based on the malicious user research, game user research, and using the GameFlow framework, we propose a novel malicious user experience design approac

Rules of professional responsibility in digital forensics: A comparative analysis

The consolidation of the rules of professional responsibility as recommended by the Committee on Identifying the Needs of Forensic Sciences Community (2009) accents the establishment of an uniform code of ethics emphasizing the importance of enforceability in strengthening the role the forensic science plays within the criminal justice system. Equally pertinent for the domain of digital forensics, this imperative entails a research commitment in comparing and contrasting the respective codes of ethics to illustrate their “variety, specificity and enforceability” in order to inform the discussion on the regulative aspects of the digital forensic discipline. Accordingly, this paper reviews the professional responsibility regulation inaugurated in both the US and international digital forensics arena aiming to bring give a closer and more detailed perspective on the practice harmonization within the digital real

The Impact of Mobile Network Forensics Evidence on the Criminal Case Processing Performance in Macedonia: An Institutional Analysis Study

The purpose of this study was to explore the contribution of the localization data, network-management data, and content-of-communication data in the case processing performance in Macedonia. The mobile network forensics evidence was analyzed respective to the impact of the mobile network data variety, the mobile network data volume, and the forensic processing on the case disposition time. The results from this study indicate that the case disposition time is negatively correlated with the network-management data volume and positively correlated with the content-of-communication data volume. The relevance of the network-management data was recognized in the highly granular service behavior profile developed using larger number of records, while the relevance of the content-of-communication data was recognized in the substantial number of excerpts of intercepted communication. The results also reveal a difference in the case processing time for the cases where there is only localization or network-management data versus when they are combined with the content-of-communication data

Fight Fire with Fire: Hacktivists' Take on Social Media Misinformation

In this study, we interviewed 22 prominent hacktivists to learn their take on the increased proliferation of misinformation on social media. We found that none of them welcomes the nefarious appropriation of trolling and memes for the purpose of political (counter)argumentation and dissemination of propaganda. True to the original hacker ethos, misinformation is seen as a threat to the democratic vision of the Internet, and as such, it must be confronted on the face with tried hacktivists' methods like deplatforming the "misinformers" and doxing or leaking data about their funding and recruitment. The majority of the hacktivists also recommended interventions for raising misinformation literacy in addition to targeted hacking campaigns. We discuss the implications of these findings relative to the emergent recasting of hacktivism in defense of a constructive and factual social media discourse

Older Adults' Experiences with Misinformation on Social Media

Older adults habitually encounter misinformation on social media, but there is little knowledge about their experiences with it. In this study, we combined a qualitative survey (n=119) with in-depth interviews (n=21) to investigate how older adults in America conceptualize, discern, and contextualize social media misinformation. As misinformation on social media in the past was driven towards influencing voting outcomes, we were particularly interested to approach our study from a voting intention perspective. We found that 62% of the participants intending to vote Democrat saw a manipulative political purpose behind the spread of misinformation while only 5% of those intending to vote Republican believed misinformation has a political dissent purpose. Regardless of the voting intentions, most participants relied on source heuristics combined with fact-checking to discern truth from misinformation on social media. The biggest concern about the misinformation, among all the participants, was that it increasingly leads to biased reasoning influenced by personal values and feelings instead of reasoning based on objective evidence. The participants intending to vote Democrat were in 74% of the cases concerned that misinformation will cause escalation of extremism in the future, while those intending to vote Republican, were undecided, or planned to abstain were concerned that misinformation will further erode the trust in democratic institutions, specifically in the context of public health and free and fair elections. During our interviews, we found that 63% of the participants who intended to vote Republican, were fully aware and acknowledged that Republican or conservative voices often time speak misinformation, even though they are closely aligned to their political ideology