Purpose The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to detect and prevent virtual property theft in virtual world environments. The issue of virtual property theft is a serious problem which has ramifications in both the real and virtual world. Virtual world users invest a considerable amount of time, effort and often money to collect virtual property, only to have them stolen by thieves. Many virtual property thefts go undetected and often only discovered after the incident has occurred. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents the design of an autonomic detection framework to identify virtual property theft at two key stages: account intrusion and virtual property trades. Account intrusion is an unauthorized user attempting to gain access to an account and unauthorized virtual property trades are trading of items between two users which exhibit theft characteristics. Findings Initial tests of this framework on a synthetic data set show an 80 per cent detection rate. This framework allows virtual world developers to tailor and extend it to suit their specific requirements. It provides an effective way of detecting virtual property theft while being low maintenance, user friendly and cost effective. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, there is no detection framework, system or tool that works on virtual property theft detection in virtual world environments without access to authentic virtual world data or attack data (because of privacy issues and unwillingness of virtual world environments companies to collaborate). The topic of virtual property theft, lack of existing labelled data sets, user anonymity, size of virtual world environments data sets and privacy issues with virtual world companies and a number of other critical factors distinguish this paper from previous studies.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to mitigate vulnerabilities in web applications, security detection and prevention are the most important mechanisms for security. However, most existing research focuses on how to prevent an attack at the web application layer, with less work dedicated to setting up a response action if a possible attack happened. Design/methodology/approach – A combination of a Signature-based Intrusion Detection System (SIDS) and an Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (AIDS), namely, the Intelligent Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IIDPS). Findings – After evaluating the new system, a better result was generated in line with detection efficiency and the false alarm rate. This demonstrates the value of direct response action in an intrusion detection system. Research limitations/implications – Data limitation. Originality/value – The contributions of this paper are to first address the problem of web application vulnerabilities. Second, to propose a combination of an SIDS and an AIDS, namely, the IIDPS. Third, this paper presents a novel approach by connecting the IIDPS with a response action using fuzzy logic. Fourth, use the risk assessment to determine an appropriate response action against each attack event. Combining the system provides a better performance for the Intrusion Detection System, and makes the detection and prevention more effective.

Advances in parallel, distributed, embedded, and ubiquitous systems Computing systems are now invading in every aspect of our daily life and promise to revolutionize our life. The emergence of the related technology is a natural outcome of research and technological advances in a variety of areas including parallel computing, distributed computing, embedded systems, pervasive computing and communications, wireless networks, mobile computing, and agent technologies. These new and exciting paradigms provide computing and communication services to the end users all the time and everywhere. This special issue focuses on the recent advances in the new generation computing systems such as parallel, distributed, embedded, and ubiquitous systems.

The continuously rising Internet attacks pose severe challenges to develop an effective Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect known and unknown malicious attack. In order to address the problem of detecting known, unknown attacks and identify an attack grouped, the authors provide a new multi stage rules for detecting anomalies in multi-stage rules. The authors used the RIPPER for rule generation, which is capable to create rule sets more quickly and can determine the attack types with smaller numbers of rules. These rules would be efficient to apply for Signature Intrusion Detection System (SIDS) and Anomaly Intrusion Detection System (AIDS).

The issue of virtual property theft in virtual worlds is a serious problem which has ramifications in both the real and virtual world. Virtual world users invest a considerable amount of time, effort and often money to collect virtual property items, only to have them stolen by thieves. Many virtual property thefts go undetected, with thieves often stealing virtual property items without resistance, leaving victims to discover the theft only after it has occurred. This paper presents the design of a detection framework that uses an algorithm for identifying virtual property theft at two key stages: account intrusion and unauthorized virtual property trades. Initial tests of this framework on a synthetic data set show an 80% detection rate with no false positives. This framework can allow virtual world developers to tailor and extend it to suit their specific virtual world software and provide an effective way of detecting virtual property theft while being a low maintenance, user friendly and cost effective.

Current software environments used to support parallel processing on a cluster of workstations (COW) are not satisfactory, do not provide complete transparency and are not specifically designed for parallel processing. In particular, the establishment of a parallel processing environment and the initialisation of parallel processes suffer from poor performance. Each parallel process of an application is created sequentially and in many cases the logon operation must be completed before remote resources could be acquired. These operations are also performed manually. We present in this paper an original approach that addresses the problem of parallel process creation. The remote workstations are acquired completely transparently and dynamically, and parallel processes are created concurrently. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach we show a system based on RHODOS (a client/server and microkernel based distributed operating system), specifically designed to improve the performance of process instantiation and therefore able to improve the overall execution performance of parallel programs, in particular parallel process creation. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We claim that both remote process creation and process migration are efficient mechanisms to be used in the improvement or development of high performance computer systems. In particular we demonstrate that the claims made by some researchers that process migration is too heavy to be used to support dynamic load balancing are unsubstantiated. We support our claim by presenting these two mechanisms available in the RHODOS distributed operating system, comparing and contrasting these mechanisms and reporting on their performance.