The Role of ICTs in the Management of Citizen Initiatives led by Women from Vulnerable Communities of Bañado Sur de Asunción During COVID-19

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and describe the use and role of ICTs during the pandemic generated by COVID-19, in vulnerable communities led by women from Bañado Sur in Asuncion, Paraguay. We focus mainly on the citizen initiative called "ollas populares", which emerged as a response to the lack of food security that was exacerbated by the pandemic in vulnerable territories. Based on two case studies, we explore how ICTs helped (or not) in the resolution of the food security problem through community collective action, led by women, identifying criteria for the use and design of ICTs for collective action in crisis contexts. The theoretical framework of social capital, understood as the set of interpersonal and trust networks that are built around individuals and groups in society, and that influence collective action and community resilience, serves as a framework for analyzing and discussing the case studies. In the two cases studied, we observe how the use of ICTs allowed the expansion of the support networks of the women who led the collective action of the soup kitchens in these communities. This article discusses these results and the main lessons learned from the case studies we analyzed. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Security Issues in Digital Learning Spaces

Since the advent of COVID-19, most schools and universities have adopted online courses to reduce the spread of the virus. However, they failed to address security issues adequately in a rush to embrace digital learning platforms. Unfortunately, the platforms used for online courses collect and generate data that attracts hackers. Also, cyberattacks have been increasing since the advent of COVID-19. Therefore, it is essential to outline digital learning spaces' security issues to find solutions to ensure learners' and teachers' safety. This paper discusses vulnerabilities and cyberattacks and their impacts on digital learning spaces. We used the classification of the most common web application vulnerabilities presented by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE). In addition to the technical risks, this paper also highlights management and user operational risks caused by human errors and ignorance. Furthermore, we performed a comparative study on the vulnerabilities of the most used Learning management Systems (LMS) and video conferencing tools. The study revealed that Moodle is the most vulnerable to attacks, Blackboard is the most secure among LMSs, and Zoom is the most secure among video conferencing tool. © 2021 IEEE.

Analysis of the Dynamics of Internet Threats for Corporate Network Web Service

Analyzing web service logs is an important task to ensure the uninterruptible functioning and security for computer systems. When implementing complicated software systems, it is necessary to pay special attention to collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing logs of various services to identify existing and potential security problems. This paper describes an approach to analyzing the dynamics of web services functioning over two years and identifying security risks, as well as impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of Internet services. Recommendations are given to strengthen the protection of web services and reduce cybersecurity risks. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).