Security Issues at the Time of the Pandemic and Distance Work

Security issues have always been central to workplaces. Increased work performed at home environments caused by COVID-19 pandemic has changed the security landscape of work radically. Security arrangements are no more at the domain of the employer, yet the risks remain, and responsibilities. In this chapter we discuss this new boom of distance work from the viewpoints of data privacy and security, physical safety and mental well-being. The issues are intertwined, and changes, risks and solutions in one of these cause implications for the other areas too. In data privacy and security, the home office environment causes several risks, and the mixed use of devices and facilities both in work and leisure use causes difficulties. Physical safety is compromised in several ways at home environment, which is partly confounding, as the very core of work at home and social distancing is the search for physical security from COVID viruses. Mental well-being problems are a key product of this social distancing, and they do not typically emerge immediately, but first after a long period. With the COVID-19 pandemic over two years, we first start to see the magnitude of the mental well-being problems it has caused. The COVID-19 pandemic is a very short period in history. For individuals living now, it can deeply affect life, especially in critical periods of life. On the positive side, the very special pressure COVID-19 has caused on working life has surely improved and speeded up academic and practical work in distance work development. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Social Media Content Compilation of Online Banking Scams in the Philippines: A Literature Review

Online banking has been proven to be an effective and convenient way of providing banking services anywhere and has been a necessity since the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the Philippines. Alongside this fact, people have been victims of scams involving these online services. Therefore, this paper aimed to analyze reports of online banking scams reported on social media using content analysis. The 26 filtered posts are labeled with 27 codes generated, and the top six were discussed. Specifically, scam (88.46%) was the most common code, followed by phone calls (57.69%) and impersonation (53.84%). Benefits, verifying personal information, and social engineering all had 46.15% occurrences. It is recommended for potential online banking scams to verify with the bank before giving away information, and to raise awareness on the possible technique's scammers use. © 2023 ACM.

Face Mask Detection Using YOLOv3

The COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis that has resulted in several security issues and large number of casualties. People frequently use masks to protect themselves against the transmission of coronavirus. In view of the fact that specific aspects of the face are obscured, facial identification becomes extremely difficult. During the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, researchers' primary focus has been to come up with suggestions for dealing with the problem through rapid and efficient solutions, as mask detection is required in the current scenario, whether in public or in some institutions such as offices and other workplaces. Only detecting whether a person wears mask or not is not enough. There is another aspect of wearing the mask properly such that it covers all the required portion of the face to ensure there is no exposure to any viruses. To address this, we proposed a reliable technique based on image classification and object localization, which can be accomplished using YOLO v3's object detection in machine learning. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Telemedical Early Medical Abortion: Notes for a Debate in Italy

The activism of non-profit organizations such as Women on Web has shown that telehealth abortion services represent an important way to access a safe abortion where antiabortion laws are in place. At the same time, this use of telehealth provides an innovative model to rethink abortion services also within a formal healthcare system, as became particularly clear with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the experience of telehealth services offered by groups such as Women on Web and the recent policy on telemedicine in England, this timely and innovative contribution illustrates how the implementation of telemedicine can improve abortion access in Italy. © Annali dell'Istituto Storico Itali-Germanico in Trento. All rights reserved.

A Novel Approach to Ensure Security and Privacy While Using QR Code Scanning in Business Applications

One of many challenges created by COVID-19 pandemic is to reduce need of contact. Quick Response (QR) codes offered a readily available solution to this challenge with offer to support contact less processes. Wide adaption of smart mobile devices like smart phones and tablets and huge number of mobile applications available in the respective application stores, which support QR code scanning acted as a catalyst in rapid adaption of QR codes to support contact less processes. Support of QR code-based processing rapidly increased during the pandemic, penetrated all processes like sales and marketing, authentication, and digital payments to name some. On one hand, this served the cause in terms of reducing contact, on other hand, factors like rapid adaption and using it in smart mobile devices, which are existing to cater to the larger purpose of human usage, scanning QR codes was not in that list to start with is bringing in the series of security issues which can arise starting from the human factor, software, misuse and hacking factors. This paper focuses on the QR code processes, differences in terms of security while using a smart device for QR codes when compared to the rugged device-based barcode scanners, the kind of security issues such process can encounter while using smart devises for QR code scanning, factors that must be considered by the applications development as well as the consumers of such functionality and the way to ensure security of consumers of such functionality. © 2022 IEEE.

No Salvation from Trackers: Privacy Analysis of Religious Websites and Mobile Apps

Many religious communities are going online to save costs and reach a large audience to spread their religious beliefs. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, such online transitions have accelerated, primarily to maintain the existence and continuity of religious communities. However, online religious services (e.g., websites and mobile apps) open the door to privacy and security issues that result from tracking and leakage of personal/sensitive information. While web privacy in popular sites (e.g., commercial and social media sites) is widely studied, privacy and security issues of religious online services have not been systematically studied. In this paper, we perform privacy and security measurements in religious websites and Android apps: 62,373 unique websites and 1454 Android apps, pertaining to major religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism). We identified the use of commercial trackers on religious websites—e.g., 32% of religious websites and 78% of religious Android apps host Google trackers. Session replay services (FullStory, Yandex, Inspectlet, Lucky Orange) on 198 religious sites sent sensitive information to third parties. Religious sites (14) and apps (7) sent sensitive information in clear text. Besides privacy issues, we also identify sites with potential security issues: 19 religious sites were vulnerable to various security issues;and 69 religious websites and 29 Android apps were flagged by VirusTotal as malicious. We hope our findings will raise awareness of privacy and security issues in online religious services. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Cyberattacks and Solutions for Future Factories

This paper discusses the major technologies used in modern factories and highlights some important types of cyberattacks. Industrial espionage and information theft are the most common cyberattacks because of the digitalization of industrial processes. Some of the solutions used are also discussed for the security issues in future factories. The paper mentioned the importance of data security and the steps to achieve it in modern factories. It is worth noting the Corona crisis (Covid-19) and its impact on life in all respects, and certainly had an impact on modern factories, and during this period modern factories were exposed to many cyber-attacks. The last thing focused on in this paper is the cybersecurity challenges of large industrial IoT systems. © 2022 IEEE.

Privacy and Integrity Threats in Contact Tracing Systems and Their Mitigations

Several countries adopted the Google & Apple exposure notification system (GAEN) to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus down. GAEN promised to guarantee security and privacy through a decentralized approach. In this paper, we report several relevant privacy and integrity threats in GAEN, including new attacks. GAEN's security issues are not inherent risks of contact tracing systems. Indeed, we also propose a system named Pronto-B2 which enjoys a much better resilience with respect to mass surveillance and replay attacks. IEEE

Mobile Mental Health Apps: Alternative Intervention or Intrusion?

Mental health is an extremely important subject, especially in these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ubiquitous mobile phones can equip users to supplement psychiatric treatment and manage their mental health. Mobile Mental Health (MMH) apps emerge as an effective alternative to assist with a broad range of psychological disorders filling the much-needed patient-provider accessibility gap. However, it also raises significant concerns with sensitive information leakage. The absence of a transparent privacy policy and lack of user awareness may pose a significant threat to undermining the applicability of such tools. We conducted a multifold study of - 1) Privacy policies (Manually and with Polisis, an automated framework to evaluate privacy policies);2) App permissions;3) Static Analysis for inherent security issues;4) Dynamic Analysis for threat surface and vulnerabilities detection, and 5) Traffic Analysis. Our results indicate that apps' exploitable flaws, dangerous permissions, and insecure data handling pose a potential threat to the users' privacy and security. The Dynamic analysis identified 145 vulnerabilities in 20 top-rated MMH apps where attackers and malicious apps can access sensitive information. 45% of MMH apps use a unique identifier, Hardware Id, which can link a unique id to a particular user and probe users' mental health. Traffic analysis shows that sensitive mental health data can be leaked through insecure data transmission. MMH apps need better scrutiny and regulation for more widespread usage to meet the increasing need for mental health care without being intrusive to the already vulnerable population. © 2022 IEEE.

An approach for DoS attack detection in cloud computing using sine cosine anti coronavirus optimized deep maxout network

Purpose The Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a category of intrusion that devours various services and resources of the organization by the dispersal of unusable traffic, so that reliable users are not capable of getting benefit from the services. In general, the DoS attackers preserve their independence by collaborating several victim machines and following authentic network traffic, which makes it more complex to detect the attack. Thus, these issues and demerits faced by existing DoS attack recognition schemes in cloud are specified as a major challenge to inventing a new attack recognition method. Design/methodology/approach This paper aims to detect DoS attack detection scheme, termed as sine cosine anti coronavirus optimization (SCACVO)-driven deep maxout network (DMN). The recorded log file is considered in this method for the attack detection process. Significant features are chosen based on Pearson correlation in the feature selection phase. The over sampling scheme is applied in the data augmentation phase, and then the attack detection is done using DMN. The DMN is trained by the SCACVO algorithm, which is formed by combining sine cosine optimization and anti-corona virus optimization techniques. Findings The SCACVO-based DMN offers maximum testing accuracy, true positive rate and true negative rate of 0.9412, 0.9541 and 0.9178, respectively. Originality/value The DoS attack detection using the proposed model is accurate and improves the effectiveness of the detection.

LTPS - Service for long-term preservation of digital signatures

Digital transformation of public or private services, although it brings many improvements for our societies, it also raises security issues, mainly when focusing on the migration of physical signed documents in the digital environment. Digital signatures have proven to be reliable, thus they have seen a higher adoption in the last few years, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, a disadvantage is that digital signatures are volatile, being valid only for a maximum of a few years, depending on the validity of the asymmetric private key used to create that digital signature. Thus, validating a signed document after a few years could prove to be troublesome. In order to solve this problem, legislative and standardization efforts have been made and the legal and technical frameworks for long-term preservation services have been issued. In this paper we focus on the presentation of our implementation of a long-term preservation service for digital signatures, that is part of an entire long-term preservation system composed of multiple services, as mentioned in the paper. Our implementation is compliant with ETSI standards and uses the capabilities of current PKI infrastructures, while also adding in the resilience and trust of the blockchain. © 2022 IEEE.

Research on the Security Protocol Under the Health Code System

In response to the outbreak of the new coronavirus pneumonia- "COVID-19" in 2019, the health code is widely used in China as an effective means of epidemic prevention and testing. The information security issues among the health code have important research significance. This paper proposes a set of security protocols based on the existing cryptographic theory system, the information security issues of health codes will also be discussed in depth on this basis. In the study, some problems with the use of health code was explained and solutions were proposed. © VDE VERLAG GMBH - Berlin - Offenbach.

The Privacy Paradox-Investigating People's Attitude Towards Privacy in a Time of COVID-19

The advent of digital technologies used as a mechanism to deal with the Covid-19 global pandemic, has raised serious concerns around privacy and security issues. Despite these concerns and the potential risk of data misuse, including third party use, countries around the world have pushed the use and proliferation of contact-tracing applications. However, the success of these contact-tracing applications relies on their adoption and use. A well known phenomenon referred to as privacy paradox is defined as the discrepancy between the expressed privacy concern and the actual behaviour of users when it comes to protect their privacy. In this context, this paper presents a study investigating the privacy paradox in the context of a global pandemic. A national survey has been conducted and the data is analysed to examine people's privacy risk perception. The results show inconsistencies between people's privacy concerns and their actual behaviour that is reflected in their attitude shift of sharing their mobile data during a global pandemic. The study also compiles a list of recommendations for policymakers. © 2022 IEEE.

Preventive Measures for Digital Learning Spaces' Security Issues

The COVID-19 pandemic affected humanity and changed impacted people's habits worldwide. The necessity for social distancing has led to increasing remote working and online learning. As a result, many schools, institutions, and universities quickly adopted online learning to ensure the continuity of their training. Unfortunately, security was not a significant factor during the migration to digital learning. Consequently, security risks increased significantly with the advent of COVID-19 and cyberattacks do not spare education systems. This paper highlights security issues of digital learning spaces from the perspective of the Learning Management System and video conferencing tools. Also, we propose preventive measures to overcome each vulnerability. In addition, beyond the prevention measures, digital learning stakeholders need to be aware of the security principles and best practices to adopt before, during and after the sessions. © 2022 IEEE.

A Study on Perception of Online Education

Pandemic covid 19 has created problem for the whole world in many folds. People have lost their lives and there has been an economic crisis in the families and in all sectors. This pandemic has not only affected livelihood, but students have been affected badly. Especially school children have not experienced their study in a proper way during pandemic because they could not meet their classmates and there has been no interaction with teacher. In a similar way, college students have not felt that good as they could not go to college for studies, and they had no face to face interaction with faculty. College teachers were missing their students as education was through online only during pandemic. Since teaching had to continue in this time therefore government has taken a good initiative that online teaching is a boom at this point of time for uninterrupted teaching. Despite of few cons of online education, this online education has made many teachers tech savvy and increased market value of teachers and their confidence got boosted. Still online education is playing a very important role in current education. This paper is an attempt to see students' perception towards online education in Madhya Pradesh State. 114 completely filled responses were received and Reliability analysis, t test, Anova were applied to test the hypotheses. © The Electrochemical Society

An IoT Based Intelligent Screening System for Preventing COVID 19 Spread in Premises

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to huge number of security issues and casualties. In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19, wearing mask and contactless thermal scanning has become mandatory. The conventional methods for visitor screening and temperature measurement have become inappropriate in this situation to avoid any contact. The traditional face recognition techniques are also ineffective as wearing mask hides some parts of the face. This paper presents an Intelligent IoT based screening system capable of contactless thermal scanning, mask detection and masked face recognition. The person not following the Covid-19 guidelines will be denied the access inside the premise. The system uses deep-learning based techniques for masked face recognition by discarding masked region. The data collected has been sent to the cloud using custom protocol stack which is lightweight, reliable and efficient for data communication. Using web application and mobile application, the data corresponding to each user can be monitored remotely using internet. The data collected can be shared to healthcare agencies for further analysis. © 2021 IEEE.

Traceability System in Hydroponic Vegetables Supply Chain Using Blockchain Technology

Hydroponics is a soilless plant cultivation technology using nutrient solutions in water. The development of hydroponic agriculture globally and in Indonesia is increasing, which correlates with hydroponic vegetable production. There is a safety issue for hydroponic vegetables in diseases and poi-soning cases due to contamination related to the product supply chain’s security issue amid the coronavirus pandemic or COVID-19. The laws and regulations about hydroponic vegetables’ traceability encourage companies to adapt and implementing the rules to give consumers trusted informa-tion. One of the tools to ensure food supply chain information and transparency is a traceability system. The study aims to design a traceability system using a rapid structured prototyping approach that combines the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Prototyping methods. This study examined the traceability system in the hydroponic vegetable business process and reviews its authenticity by developing a traceability system prototype using blockchain technology. © 2021, Tamkang University. All rights reserved.

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.

Cyber Trends in Industrial Control Systems

The development of technologies reaches new heights, but with them come new security issues. With some of the biggest data breaches in history made in 2019 alone, it is clear that cyber-attacks will not go away any time soon. In the recent past, security concerns for control systems have focused on limiting physical attacks. Industrial systems today use the Internet and cloud technologies, making them vulnerable to modern attacks. With the COVID-19 pandemic many people moved to work from home, which led to an increase in cyber-attacks. This article presents a study of current threats to industrial systems and some perspectives on them. © 2021 IEEE.

Current Trend of IoT Market and its Security Threats

IoT can be described as billions of devices connected to internet for the purpose of collection and sharing of data across the globe. Many technical and business sectors have been actively researching on IoT for past two decades. With the current scenario of COVID-19 pandemic, IoT can offer better solution for health care and lifestyle and can help to maintain the SOP issued by the government. However, it still faces many issues to deal with and is not mature enough This paper deals with the characteristics and limitation of IoT, study of IoT market globally and in India, role of IoT during pandemic and general security issues of IoT. © 2021 IEEE.