Network traffic analysis has been increasingly used in various applications to either protect or threaten people, information, and systems. Website fingerprinting is a passive traffic analysis attack which threatens web navigation privacy. It is a set of techniques used to discover patterns from a sequence of network packets generated while a user accesses different websites. Internet users (such as online activists or journalists) may wish to hide their identity and online activity to protect their privacy. Typically, an anonymity network is utilized for this purpose. These anonymity networks such as Tor (The Onion Router) provide layers of data encryption which poses a challenge to the traffic analysis techniques. Although various defenses have been proposed to counteract this passive attack, they have been penetrated by new attacks that proved the ineffectiveness and/or impracticality of such defenses. In this work, we introduce a novel defense algorithm to counteract the website fingerprinting attacks. The proposed defense obfuscates original website traffic patterns through the use of double sampling and mathematical optimization techniques to deform packet sequences and destroy traffic flow dependency characteristics used by attackers to identify websites. We evaluate our defense against state-of-the-art studies and show its effectiveness with minimal overhead and zero-delay transmission to the real traffic.

Conventional cyber defenses typically respond to detected attacks by rejecting them as quickly and decisively as possible; but aborted attacks are missed learning opportunities for intrusion detection. A method of reimagining cyber attacks as free sources of live training data for machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSes) is proposed and evaluated. Rather than aborting attacks against legitimate services, adversarial interactions are selectively prolonged to maximize the defender's harvest of useful threat intelligence. Enhancing web services with deceptive attack-responses in this way is shown to be a powerful and practical strategy for improved detection, addressing several perennial challenges for machine learning-based IDS in the literature, including scarcity of training data, the high labeling burden for (semi-)supervised learning, encryption opacity, and concept differences between honeypot attacks and those against genuine services. By reconceptualizing software security patches as feature extraction engines, the approach conscripts attackers as free penetration testers, and coordinates multiple levels of the software stack to achieve fast, automatic, and accurate labeling of live web data streams.

Data streams are continuous flows of data points. Novel class detection is an important part of data stream mining. A novel class is a newly emerged class that has not previously been modeled by the classifier over the input stream. This paper proposes deep embedding for novel class detection - a novel approach that combines feature learning using denoising autoencoding with novel class detection. A denoising autoencoder is a neural network with hidden layers aiming to reconstruct the input vector from a corrupted version. A nonparametric multidimensional change point detection approach is also proposed, to detect concept-drift (the change of data feature values over time). Experiments on several real datasets show that the approach significantly improves the performance of novel class detection.

Summary The Global Database of Event, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is the only global political georeferenced event dataset with more than 250 million observations covering all countries in the world since January 1, 1979. TABARI and CAMEO are the tools that are used to collect and code events from all international news coverage. To query such big geospatial data, traditional RDBMS can no longer be used, and the need for parallel distributed solutions has become a necessity. MapReduce paradigm has proven to be a scalable platform to process and analyze Big Data in the cloud. Hadoop, as an implementation of MapReduce, is an open‐source application that has been widely used and accepted in academia and industry. However, when dealing with Spatial Data, Hadoop is not equipped well and does not perform efficiently. SpatialHadoop is an extension of Hadoop with the support of spatial data. In this paper, we present Geographic Information System Query and Analytics Framework (GISQAF), which has been built on top of SpatialHadoop. GISQAF focuses on two parts: query processing and data analytics. For the query processing part, we show how this solution outperforms Hadoop query processing by orders of magnitude when applying queries on the GDELT dataset with a size of 60 GB. We show the results for various types of queries. For the data analytics part, we present an approach for finding Spatial co‐occurring events. We show how GISQAF is suitable and efficient to handle data analytics techniques. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Streaming data is one of the attention receiving sources for concept-evolution studies. When a new class occurs in the data stream it can be considered as a new concept and so the concept-evolution. One attractive problem occurring in the concept-evolution studies is the recurring classes from our previous study. In data streams, a class can disappear and reappear after a while. Existing studies on data stream classification techniques either misclassify the recurring class or falsely identify the recurring classes as novel classes. Because of the misclassification or false novel classification, the error rates increases on those studies. In this paper we address the problem by defining a novel ensemble technique “class-based” ensemble which replaces the traditional “chunk-based” approach in order to detect the recurring classes. We discuss the details of two different approaches in class-based ensemble and explain and compare them in detail. Different than the previous studies in the field, we also prove the superiority of both “class-based” ensemble method over state-of-art techniques via empirical approach on a number of benchmark data sets including Web comments as text mining challenge.

Collecting observations from all international news coverage and using TABARI software to code events, the Global Database of Event, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is the only global political georeferenced event dataset with 250+ million observations covering all countries in the world from January 1, 1979 to the present with daily updates. The purpose of this widely used dataset is to help understand and uncover spatial, temporal and perceptual trends and behaviors of the social and international system. To query such big geospatial data, traditional RDBMS can no longer be used and the need for parallel distributed solutions has become a necessity. MapReduce paradigm has proved to be a scalable platform to process and analyze Big Data in the cloud. Hadoop as an implementation of MapReduce is an open source application that has been widely used and accepted in academia and industry. However, when dealing with Spatial Data, Hadoop is not equipped well and falls short as it doesn't perform efficiently in terms of running time. SpatialHadoop is an extension of Hadoop with the support of spatial data. In this paper, we present Geographic Information System Querying Framework (GISQF) to process Massive Spatial Data. This framework has been built on top of the open source SpatialHadoop system which exploits two-layer spatial indexing techniques to speed up query processing. We show how this solution outperforms Hadoop query processing by orders of magnitude when applying queries on GDELT dataset with a size of 60 GB. We show the results for three types of queries, Longitude-Latitude Point queries, Circle-Area queries, and Aggregation queries.

Aim of this study is applying the ensemble classification methods over the stock market closing values, which can be assumed as time series and finding out the relation between the economy news. In order to keep the study back ground clear, the majority voting method has been applied over the three classification algorithms, which are the k-nearest neighborhood, support vector machine and the C4.5 tree. The results gathered from two different feature extraction methods are correlated with majority voting meta classifier (ensemble method) which is running over three classifiers. The results show the success rates are increased after the ensemble at least 2 to 3 percent success rate.