Application layer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are among the deadliest kinds of attacks that have significant impact on destination servers and networks due to their ability to be launched with minimal computational resources to cause an effect of high magnitude. Commercial and government Web servers have become the primary target of these kinds of attacks, with the recent mitigation efforts struggling to deaden the problem efficiently.
Most application layer DDoS attacks can successfully mimic legitimate traffic without being detected by Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). IDSs and IPSs can also mistake a normal and legitimate activity for a malicious one, producing a False Positive (FP) that affects Web users if it is ignored or dropped. False positives in a large and complex network topology can potentially be dangerous as they may cause IDS/IPS to block the user's benign traffic.Our focus and contributions in this paper are first, to mitigate the undetected malicious traffic mimicking legitimate traffic and developing a special anti-DDoS module for general and specific DDoS tools attacks by using a trained classifier in a random tree machinelearning algorithm. We use labeled datasets to generate rules to incorporate and fine-tune existing IDS/IPS such as Snort. Secondly, we further assist IDS/IPS by processing traffic that is classified as malicious by the IDS/IPS in order to identify FPs and route them to their intended destinations. To achieve this, our approach uses active authentication of traffic source of both legitimate and malicious traffic at the Bait and Decoy server respectively before destined to the Web server.
Phishing attacks have been persistent for more than two decades despite mitigation efforts from academia and industry. We believe that users fall victim to attacks not only because of lack of knowledge and awareness, but also because they are not attentive enough to security indicators and visual abnormalities on the webpages they visit. This is also probably why smart device users, who have more limited screen size and device capabilities compared to desktop users, are three times more likely to fall victim to phishing attacks. To assert our claim, we first investigated general phishing awareness among different groups of smartphone users. We then used smart eyeglasses (electro-oculographic) to experimentally measure the mental effort and vigilance exhibited by users while surfing a website and while playing an Android phishing game that we developed. The results showed that knowledge and awareness about phishing do not seem to have a significant impact on security behaviours, as knowledgeable participants exhibited insecure behaviours such as opening email attachments from unfamiliar senders. However, attentiveness was important as even participants with low cybersecurity knowledge could effectively identify attacks if they were reasonably attentive. Based on these results, we asserted that users are more likely to continue falling victim to phishing attacks due to insecure behaviours, unless tools to lessen the identification burden are provided. We thus recommended implementing a lightweight algorithm into a custom Android browser for detecting phishing sites deceptively without a user interaction. We used fake login credentials as validation agents and monitor the destination server HTTP responses to determine the authenticity of a webpage. We also presented initial evaluation results of this algorithm.
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