As cyber threats and attacks are immensely increasing and broadly spreading catastrophically worldwide, cyber security professionals need to cope up with such a highly demanding environment. Security teams, such as Security operation Centre (SOC), Incident Response (IR) and Threat management teams are the people responsible for dealing with cyber security threats and attacks from detection to containment and preventing future incidents; which encompasses some significant challenges that might impose some limitations to the efficiency and effectiveness of activities cyber security professionals conduct, as these processes are time-consuming. In this paper we propose an integrated platform to help cyber security professionals to proactively manage cyber security threats and emerging incidents by providing an automated functionality that can optimize the workflow. The proposed security platform is supposed to diminish the average time taken by cyber security professionals to respond to cyber incidents with an average of 42%. This study can be used as a preliminary design for such an integrated platform.

In the last few years, cyber security has been an essential prerequisite for almost every organization to handle the massive number of emerging cyber attacks worldwide. A critical factor in reducing the possibility of being exploited is cyber security awareness. Not only having the adequate knowledge but how to utilize this knowledge to prevent cyber attacks. In this paper we conducted a survey that focuses on three vital security parameters, which are trust, passwords and defensive attitude respectively. The survey mainly aimed at assessing cyber security knowledge of 200 students and 100 faculty members in a Sudanese college and how secure these participants think they are according to their current cyber behaviour. 56% of the participants are males and 44% are females. The results revealed that all participants were having fairly-low level of security awareness and their defensive attitude is considerably weak and doesn’t protect them either individually or at institutional-level. Nevertheless, faculty member showed better cyber security knowledge and skills by 8% higher than students. This study can be used to develop training approaches that bridge the security gaps depicted by the respondents of the survey questions manipulated in this study.

Ransomware attacks have been spreading broadly in the last few years, where attackers deny users’ access to their systems and encrypt their files until they pay a ransom, usually in Bitcoin. Of course, that is the worst thing that can happen; especially for organizations having sensitive information. In this paper we proposed a cyber security awareness program intended to provide end-users with a rescue checklist in case of being attacked with a ransomware as well as preventing the attack and ways to recover from it. The program aimed at providing cyber security knowledge to 15 employees in a Sudanese trading and investment company. According to their cyber behaviour before the program, the participants showed a low level cyber security awareness that with 72% they are likely of being attacked by a ransomware from a phishing email, which is well known for spreading ransomware attacks. The results revealed that the cyber security awareness program greatly diminished the probability of being attacked by a ransomware with an average of 28%. This study can be used as a real-life ransomware attack rescue plan.

In LTE there is a logical grouping of cells called Tracking Area (TA) and TAs are further grouped into Tracking Area List (TAL). Signaling overhead is greatly affected by the size of the TA and TAL respectively. Designing an optimum TAL would greatly reduce signaling overhead resulting from Tracking Area Update (TAU) and Paging procedures, which in return maximizes the network performance. This paper adopts a 2D Markov model that can be used for design optimization of TAL in LTE system by estimating the number of users in a cell within a time slot and the probability of the next location they might move to, as users move from and into cells periodically. The model was simulated in Matlab simulation software. The 2D Markov model was used to calculate TAU overhead, paging overhead and the total signaling overheads. The numerical results show that our model probably reduces the signaling overhead by about an average of 56% than that of the conventional TA scheme.