Deep Learning for Combating Misinformation in Multicategorical Text Contents.

Currently, one can observe the evolution of social media networks. In particular, humans are faced with the fact that, often, the opinion of an expert is as important and significant as the opinion of a non-expert. It is possible to observe changes and processes in traditional media that reduce the role of a conventional 'editorial office', placing gradual emphasis on the remote work of journalists and forcing increasingly frequent use of online sources rather than actual reporting work. As a result, social media has become an element of state security, as disinformation and fake news produced by malicious actors can manipulate readers, creating unnecessary debate on topics organically irrelevant to society. This causes a cascading effect, fear of citizens, and eventually threats to the state's security. Advanced data sensors and deep machine learning methods have great potential to enable the creation of effective tools for combating the fake news problem. However, these solutions often need better model generalization in the real world due to data deficits. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution involving a committee of classifiers in order to tackle the fake news detection challenge. In that regard, we introduce a diverse set of base models, each independently trained on sub-corpora with unique characteristics. In particular, we use multi-label text category classification, which helps formulate an ensemble. The experiments were conducted on six different benchmark datasets. The results are promising and open the field for further research.

Sensors and Pattern Recognition Methods for Security and Industrial Applications.

Contemporary cyberthreats continue to evolve, powering the neverending development arms race [...].

Advances in Computer Recognition, Image Processing and Communications.

This Special Issue aimed to gather high-quality advancements in theoretical and practical aspects of computer recognition, pattern recognition, image processing and machine learning (shallow and deep), including, in particular, novel implementations of these techniques in the areas of modern telecommunications and cybersecurity [...].

Implementation of the BERT-derived architectures to tackle disinformation challenges.

Recent progress in the area of modern technologies confirms that information is not only a commodity but can also become a tool for competition and rivalry among governments and corporations, or can be applied by ill-willed people to use it in their hate speech practices. The impact of information is overpowering and can lead to many socially undesirable phenomena, such as panic or political instability. To eliminate the threats of fake news publishing, modern computer security systems need flexible and intelligent tools. The design of models meeting the above-mentioned criteria is enabled by artificial intelligence and, above all, by the state-of-the-art neural network architectures, applied in NLP tasks. The BERT neural network belongs to this type of architectures. This paper presents Transformer-based hybrid architectures applied to create models for detecting fake news.

New explainability method for BERT-based model in fake news detection.

The ubiquity of social media and their deep integration in the contemporary society has granted new ways to interact, exchange information, form groups, or earn money-all on a scale never seen before. Those possibilities paired with the widespread popularity contribute to the level of impact that social media display. Unfortunately, the benefits brought by them come at a cost. Social Media can be employed by various entities to spread disinformation-so called 'Fake News', either to make a profit or influence the behaviour of the society. To reduce the impact and spread of Fake News, a diverse array of countermeasures were devised. These include linguistic-based approaches, which often utilise Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL). However, as the latest advancements in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain show, the model's high performance is no longer enough. The explainability of the system's decision is equally crucial in real-life scenarios. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to present a novel explainability approach in BERT-based fake news detectors. This approach does not require extensive changes to the system and can be attached as an extension for operating detectors. For this purposes, two Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) techniques, Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Anchors, will be used and evaluated on fake news data, i.e., short pieces of text forming tweets or headlines. This focus of this paper is on the explainability approach for fake news detectors, as the detectors themselves were part of previous works of the authors.

How to Effectively Collect and Process Network Data for Intrusion Detection?

The number of security breaches in the cyberspace is on the rise. This threat is met with intensive work in the intrusion detection research community. To keep the defensive mechanisms up to date and relevant, realistic network traffic datasets are needed. The use of flow-based data for machine-learning-based network intrusion detection is a promising direction for intrusion detection systems. However, many contemporary benchmark datasets do not contain features that are usable in the wild. The main contribution of this work is to cover the research gap related to identifying and investigating valuable features in the NetFlow schema that allow for effective, machine-learning-based network intrusion detection in the real world. To achieve this goal, several feature selection techniques have been applied on five flow-based network intrusion detection datasets, establishing an informative flow-based feature set. The authors' experience with the deployment of this kind of system shows that to close the research-to-market gap, and to perform actual real-world application of machine-learning-based intrusion detection, a set of labeled data from the end-user has to be collected. This research aims at establishing the appropriate, minimal amount of data that is sufficient to effectively train machine learning algorithms in intrusion detection. The results show that a set of 10 features and a small amount of data is enough for the final model to perform very well.

A $10 million question and other cybersecurity-related ethical dilemmas amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are like two sides of the same coin: They are opposites but cannot exist without each other. Their mutual relation generates a myriad of ethical issues, ranging from minor to vital. The rapid development of technology will surely involve even more ethical concerns, like the infamous example of a fitness tracking company allegedly paying $10 million worth of ransom. Every cybersecurity solution, tool, or practice has to be ethical by design if it is to protect people and their rights. To identify the ethical issues that cybersecurity/cybercrime might bring about in the future, we conducted the first broad and comprehensive horizon-scanning study since the COVID-19 pandemic arose. As we began this project, nobody had the slightest idea that the coming months would bring the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the reality we had known was about to change dramatically. As it soon became apparent, the deadly coronavirus brought completely new cybersecurity/cybercrime ethical dilemmas to light, and some of the ones known before were transformed or shifted. This article presents the results of our horizon-scanning study concerning the ethical dilemmas that emerged amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Systematic Review of Recommender Systems and Their Applications in Cybersecurity.

This paper discusses the valuable role recommender systems may play in cybersecurity. First, a comprehensive presentation of recommender system types is presented, as well as their advantages and disadvantages, possible applications and security concerns. Then, the paper collects and presents the state of the art concerning the use of recommender systems in cybersecurity; both the existing solutions and future ideas are presented. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: to date, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no work collecting the applications of recommenders for cybersecurity. Moreover, this paper attempts to complete a comprehensive survey of recommender types, after noticing that other works usually mention two-three types at once and neglect the others.

The Proposition and Evaluation of the RoEduNet-SIMARGL2021 Network Intrusion Detection Dataset.

Cybersecurity is an arms race, with both the security and the adversaries attempting to outsmart one another, coming up with new attacks, new ways to defend against those attacks, and again with new ways to circumvent those defences. This situation creates a constant need for novel, realistic cybersecurity datasets. This paper introduces the effects of using machine-learning-based intrusion detection methods in network traffic coming from a real-life architecture. The main contribution of this work is a dataset coming from a real-world, academic network. Real-life traffic was collected and, after performing a series of attacks, a dataset was assembled. The dataset contains 44 network features and an unbalanced distribution of classes. In this work, the capability of the dataset for formulating machine-learning-based models was experimentally evaluated. To investigate the stability of the obtained models, cross-validation was performed, and an array of detection metrics were reported. The gathered dataset is part of an effort to bring security against novel cyberthreats and was completed in the SIMARGL project.

A Deep Learning Ensemble for Network Anomaly and Cyber-Attack Detection.

Currently, expert systems and applied machine learning algorithms are widely used to automate network intrusion detection. In critical infrastructure applications of communication technologies, the interaction among various industrial control systems and the Internet environment intrinsic to the IoT technology makes them susceptible to cyber-attacks. Given the existence of the enormous network traffic in critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), traditional methods of machine learning implemented in network anomaly detection are inefficient. Therefore, recently developed machine learning techniques, with the emphasis on deep learning, are finding their successful implementations in the detection and classification of anomalies at both the network and host levels. This paper presents an ensemble method that leverages deep models such as the Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and a meta-classifier (i.e., logistic regression) following the principle of stacked generalization. To enhance the capabilities of the proposed approach, the method utilizes a two-step process for the apprehension of network anomalies. In the first stage, data pre-processing, a Deep Sparse AutoEncoder (DSAE) is employed for the feature engineering problem. In the second phase, a stacking ensemble learning approach is utilized for classification. The efficiency of the method disclosed in this work is tested on heterogeneous datasets, including data gathered in the IoT environment, namely IoT-23, LITNET-2020, and NetML-2020. The results of the evaluation of the proposed approach are discussed. Statistical significance is tested and compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in network anomaly detection.