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In this paper we present, showcase, and analize a novel framework to dissect Social Engineering (SE) attacks. The framework is based on extant theories in the cognitive sciences, and is meant as an instrument for researchers and practitioners alike to structure and analyze SE attacks of varying sophistication, isolating specific features and their effects at the cognitive level, and providing a common structure for comparisons across different attacks. We showcase the framework against attacks reproduced in the academic literature as well as against real (highly-targeted) SE attacks reported in the wild, isolating and relating effects and techniques adopted by the attackers to the target’s cognitive process. We discuss implications for research and practice of the proposed framework.

Disruptive Advanced Persistent Threats (D-APTs) are a new sophisticated class of cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructures. Whereas regular APTs are well-described in the literature, no existing APT kill chain model incorporates the disruptive actions of D-APTs and can be used to represent DAPTs in data. To this aim, the contribution of this paper is twofold: first, we review the evolution of existing APT kill chain models. Second, we present a novel D-APT model based on existing ATP models and military theory. The model describes the strategic objective setting, the operational kill chain and the tactics of the attacker, as well as the defender’s critical infrastructure, processes and societal function.

The Workshop on Attackers and Cybercrime Operations started in 2019 to build a strongly multidisciplinary venue providing a variety of angles (including but not limited to technical, legal, and criminological) on issues related to cybercrime and attacker operations.

Organizations are increasingly facing sophisticated social engineering attacks that exploit human vulnerabilities and overcome commonly available countermeasures. Spear-phishing campaigns are becoming the most prevalent attack and source of compromise for most organizations. We argue that existing prevention and detection countermeasures are fundamentally ineffective against this class of attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address the limitations of existing countermeasures. Our proposition is a new course of action to exploit human detection capabilities as a basis of automated response strategies. Preliminary results unveil users’ mental models for phishing detection and reporting as a way to improve the phishing reporting process altogether. A real word case study is provided to promote the feasibility of our proposal.

Obstacles detection is used nowdays for a number of road safety applications, increasing the drivers awareness in potential dangerous situations. A reliable and robust obstacles detection continues to be largely investigated and still remains an open challenge, especially for difficult scenarios and in general cases, with loosened constraints and multiple simultaneous use-cases. This work presents an obstacles detection, tracking and fusion algorithm which allows to reconstruct the environment surrounding the vehicle. While the techniques used for the detection are well-known in literature, the improvements introduced by this paper regard the data association and tracking approach of heterogeneous sensors observations. An innovative multi-dimensional structure based on association costs originating from a classifier provides an optimal solution to the association problem with respect to the total association cost. An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) managing a variable number of observations, arbitrarily composable, allows to correctly address the combined tracking and fusion challenge. The results, obtained on a public benchmark, show improvements with respect to state of the art systems.

This paper presents the main contributions of the University of Parma to the V-Charge Project, which focuses on the development of an automated valet parking and charging system. Different modules have been developed including a classifier of the regions of interest provided by an external stereo system, a detection and tracking algorithm covering the area around the vehicle, a feature tracking algorithm for obstacle detection in approaching crossroad, and a parking slots detection. All algorithms are based on images coming from fisheye cameras installed on the four sides of the vehicle.

Cybercrime is notoriously maintained and empowered by the underground economy, manifested in black markets. In such markets, attack tools and vulnerability exploits are constantly traded. In this paper, we focus on making a quantitative assessment of the risk of attacks coming from such markets, and investigating the expected reduction in overall attacks against final users if, for example, vulnerabilities traded in the black markets were all to be promptly patched. In order to conduct the analysis, we mainly use the data on (a) vulnerabilities bundled in 90+ attack tools traded in the black markets collected by us; (b) actual records of 9 × 107 attacks collected from Symantec's Data Sharing Programme WINE. Our results illustrate that black market vulnerabilities are an important source of risk for the population of users; we further show that vulnerability mitigation strategies based on black markets monitoring may outperform traditional strategies based on vulnerability CVSS scores by providing up to 20% more expected reduction in attacks.

A matrix-oriented, modular language like Scilab is suitable to realise a flexible tool for rapid evaluation of reflection, transmission, field distributions, laser gains, group delays, nonlinear effects for waves in one-dimensional quasi-periodic structures, using a coupled-mode analysis with a transfer matrix approach.

A test structure is designed in order to investigate an original procedure for accurately reproducing on a target automatic test equipment (ATE) for digital ICs the same timing setup used by a source ATE. The aim is to settle manufacturer/customer contestations. Implementation in a 2.4- mu m CMOS technology is reported, together with preliminary experimental results. >