Prolonged, intensive treatment protocols for childhood cancer disrupt family routines and daily functioning, with effects extending to all family members. Despite their unique needs, siblings of children with cancer receive limited attention from community organizations and researchers. Community-academic partnerships may foster research that effectively assesses and addresses siblings' unmet needs. In this article, "community" refers to siblings of children with cancer who participate in SuperSibs!, a national nonprofit organization for siblings of children with cancer. This article (a) describes a replicable model for successful community-academic partnerships: the Sibling Research Advisory Board (SRAB) and (b) articulates "lessons learned" from this partnership, including documenting the ability to recruit a representative sample through a community organization. Lessons emerged from an iterative process of discussion and revision that involved all SRAB members. This case study describes approaches to overcoming practical obstacles in community-partnered research planning and implementation. To meet the common goals of identifying and addressing unmet sibling needs, SRAB partners learned to establish a common language, identify each team member's unique expertise, and acknowledge differences in approach (e.g., methodology, pace of accomplishment) between research and community service. SRAB's ability to recruit a representative sample was achieved through close collaboration with SuperSibs! and implementation of active recruitment strategies to overcome barriers to research participation. Protection of community member privacy was emphasized alongside methodological rigor. Community-academic partnerships enable research with high-need, hard-to-access populations. Proactively identifying and addressing common pitfalls of community-academic partnerships promotes community engagement and acceptability and facilitates high-quality research.
A fter breaking into a system, attackers usually install rootkits to create secret backdoors and cover their tracks. Unlike the name implies, rootkits don't provide root access. Instead, they arm attackers with stealth on already compromised systems. Stealthy operations hide processes, files, and connections that let an attacker sustain long-term access without alerting system administrators. (See the "Rootkit 101" sidebar for more details on rootkits.) Fortunately, most rootkits suffer from a lack of covertness and secrecy within their binaries. This lets administrators with access to the binary, or kernel, memory, analyze it for suspicious string and symbol characteristics. They can extract the strings and symbols and determine what attackers are doing to their systems. Unfortunately, attackers can avoid analysis by using code-obfuscation techniques that make it difficult for system administrators to detect and analyze kernel rootkits. Merely looking at symbol-table and text-segment information, which contains function names, variables, and strings contained in a program, provides valuable insight into rootkits (and even nonmalicious programs) that do not employ obfuscation. In this article, we show how software developers can use obfuscation techniques to fight attackers who reverseengineer or illegally distribute commercial-software.
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