Search Results (197)

This paper examines the risks linked to E-business collaboration between China and West Africa, with particular emphasis on Ghana as a pivotal digital commerce centre. This research employs the Hesitant Fuzzy Best–Worst Method (HF-BWM) to systematically identify and prioritise the institutional, technological, sociocultural, and legal issues affecting cross-border e-business operations. This study combines Transaction Cost Theory (TCT), the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and Commitment–Trust Theory to create a comprehensive framework for analysing the interplay of these risks and their effects on transaction costs and company sustainability. The findings indicate that institutional risks constitute the most substantial obstacles, with deficient digital transaction legislation and inadequate data governance recognised as the principal drivers of uncertainty and increased transaction costs. The research indicates that these institutional challenges necessitate immediate focus, as they immediately affect corporate operations, especially in international digital commerce. Technological risks, such as cybersecurity vulnerabilities, insufficient IT skills, and deficiencies in digital infrastructure, were identified as the second most critical factors, leading to considerable operational disruptions and heightened expenses. Sociocultural hazards, such as language difficulties and varying consumer behaviours, were recognised as moderate concerns that, although significant, exert a weaker cumulative impact than technological and institutional challenges. Eventually, legal risks, especially concerning cybercrime legislation and the protection of intellectual property, were identified as substantial complicators of e-business activities, increasing the intricacy of legal compliance and cross-border contract enforcement. The results underscore the imperative for regulatory reforms, investments in cybersecurity, and methods for cultural adaptation to alleviate the identified risks and promote sustainable growth in China–West Africa e-business relationships. This study offers practical insights for governments, business leaders, and investors to effectively manage the intricate risk landscape and make educated decisions that foster enduring collaboration and trust between China and West Africa in digital trade. Full article

The growing complexity and size of healthcare systems have rendered fraud detection increasingly challenging; however, the current literature lacks a holistic view of the latest machine learning (ML) techniques with practical implementation concerns. The present study addresses this gap by highlighting the importance of machine learning (ML) in preventing and mitigating healthcare fraud, evaluating recent advancements, investigating implementation barriers, and exploring future research dimensions. To further address the limited research on the evaluation of machine learning (ML) and hybrid approaches, this study considers a broad spectrum of ML techniques, including supervised ML, unsupervised ML, deep learning, and hybrid ML approaches such as SMOTE-ENN, explainable AI, federated learning, and ensemble learning. The study also explored their potential use in enhancing fraud detection in imbalanced and multidimensional datasets. A significant finding of the study was the identification of commonly employed datasets, such as Medicare, the List of Excluded Individuals and Entities (LEIE), and Kaggle datasets, which serve as a baseline for evaluating machine learning (ML) models. The study’s findings comprehensively identify the challenges of employing machine learning (ML) in healthcare systems, including data quality, system scalability, regulatory compliance, and resource constraints. The study provides actionable insights, such as model interpretability to enable regulatory compliance and federated learning for confidential data sharing, which is particularly relevant for policymakers, healthcare providers, and insurance companies that intend to deploy a robust, scalable, and secure fraud detection infrastructure. The study presents a comprehensive framework for enhancing real-time healthcare fraud detection through self-learning, interpretable, and safe machine learning (ML) infrastructures, integrating theoretical advancements with practical application needs. Full article

The construction of knowledge graphs in cyber threat intelligence (CTI) critically relies on automated entity–relation extraction. However, sequence tagging-based methods for joint entity–relation extraction are affected by the order-dependency problem. As a result, overlapping relations are handled ineffectively. To address this limitation, a parallel, ensemble-prediction–based model is proposed for joint entity–relation extraction in CTI. The joint extraction task is reformulated as an ensemble prediction problem. A joint network that combines Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) with a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) is constructed to capture deep contextual features in sentences. An ensemble prediction module and a triad representation of entity–relation facts are designed for joint extraction. A non-autoregressive decoder is employed to generate relation triad sets in parallel, thereby avoiding unnecessary sequential constraints during decoding. In the threat intelligence domain, labeled data are scarce and manual annotation is costly. To mitigate these constraints, the SecCti dataset is constructed by leveraging ChatGPT’s small-sample learning capability for labeling and augmentation. This approach reduces annotation costs effectively. Experimental results show a 4.6% absolute F1 improvement over the baseline on joint entity–relation extraction for threat intelligence concerning Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and cybercrime activities. Full article

This study conducts a detailed analysis of cybersecurity threats, including artificial intelligence (AI)-driven cyber-attacks targeting vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and electric vehicle (EV) communications within the rapidly evolving field of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). As autonomous and electric vehicles become increasingly integrated into daily life, their susceptibility to cyber threats such as replay, jamming, spoofing, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks necessitates the development of robust cybersecurity measures. Additionally, EV-specific threats, including battery management system (BMS) exploitation and compromised charging interfaces, introduce distinct vulnerabilities requiring specialized attention. This research proposes a comprehensive and integrated cybersecurity framework that rigorously examines current V2V, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), and EV-specific systems through systematic threat assessments, vulnerability analyses, and the deployment of advanced security controls. Unlike previous state-of-the-art approaches, which primarily focus on isolated threats or specific components such as V2V protocols, the proposed framework provides a holistic cybersecurity strategy addressing the entire communication stack, EV subsystems, and incorporates AI-driven threat detection mechanisms. This comprehensive and integrated approach addresses critical gaps found in the existing literature, making it significantly more adaptable and resilient against evolving cyber-attacks. Our framework aligns with industry standards and regulatory requirements, significantly enhancing the security, safety, and reliability of modern transportation systems. By incorporating specialized cryptographic techniques, secure protocols, and continuous monitoring mechanisms, the proposed approach ensures robust protection against sophisticated cyber threats, thereby safeguarding vehicle operations and user privacy. Full article

The industrialization of cybercrime, principally through Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), has elevated HTTP cookie theft to a critical cybersecurity challenge, enabling attackers to bypass multi-factor authentication and perpetrate large-scale account takeovers. Employing a Holistic and Integrative Review methodology, this paper dissects the intricate, adaptive ecosystem of MaaS-driven cookie theft. We systematically characterize the co-evolving arms race between offensive and defensive strategies (2020–2025), revealing a critical strategic asymmetry where attackers optimize for speed and low cost, while effective defenses demand significant resources. To shift security from a reactive to an anticipatory posture, a multi-dimensional predictive framework is not only proposed but is also detailed as a formalized, testable algorithm, integrating technical, economic, and behavioral indicators to forecast emerging threat trajectories. Our findings conclude that long-term security hinges on disrupting the underlying cybercriminal economic model; we therefore reframe proactive countermeasures like Zero-Trust principles and ephemeral tokens as economic weapons designed to devalue the stolen asset. Finally, the paper provides a prioritized, multi-year research roadmap and a practical decision-tree framework to guide the implementation of these advanced, collaborative cybersecurity strategies to counter this pervasive and evolving threat. Full article

The rapid rise of AI-driven cybercrime and deepfake fraud poses complex organisational challenges for US law enforcement, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Applying Maguire’s (2003) police organisation theory, this qualitative single-case study analyses the FBI’s structure, culture, technological integration, and inter-agency collaboration. Findings underscore the organisational strengths of the FBI, including a specialised Cyber Division, advanced detection tools, and partnerships with agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, constraints, such as resource limitations, detection inaccuracies, inter-agency rivalries, and ethical concerns, including privacy risks associated with AI surveillance, hinder operational effectiveness. Fragmented global legal frameworks, diverse national capacities, and inconsistent detection of advanced deepfakes further complicate responses to this issue. This study proposes the establishment of agile task forces, public–private partnerships, international cooperation protocols, and ethical AI frameworks to counter evolving threats, offering scalable policy and technological solutions for global law enforcement. Full article

In such a dynamic and increasingly digitalized financial sector, many sophisticated fraudulent and cybercrime activities continue to challenge conventional detection systems. This research study explores a decentralized anomaly detection framework using deep autoencoders, designed to meet the dual imperatives of fraud detection effectiveness and user data privacy. Instead of relying on centralized aggregation or data sharing, the proposed model simulates distributed training across multiple financial nodes, with each institution processing data locally and independently. The framework is evaluated using two real-world datasets, the Credit Card Fraud dataset and the NeurIPS 2022 Bank Account Fraud dataset. The research methodology applied robust preprocessing, the implementation of a compact autoencoder architecture, and a threshold-based anomaly detection strategy. Evaluation metrics, such as confusion matrices, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, precision–recall (PR) curves, and reconstruction error distributions, are used to assess the model’s performance. Also, a threshold sensitivity analysis has been applied to explore detection trade-offs at varying levels of strictness. Although the model’s recall remains modest due to class imbalance, it demonstrates strong precision at higher thresholds, which demonstrates its utility in minimizing false positives. Overall, this research study is a practical and privacy-conscious approach to fraud detection that aligns with the operational realities of financial institutions and regulatory compliance toward scalability, privacy preservation, and interpretable fraud detection solutions suitable for real-world financial environments. Full article

This study attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation for cybercrimes, with emphasis on cyberbullying, by applying situational action theory (SAT). Various hypotheses regarding the motivational and moral dimensions of cyberbullying are presented. Specifically, the interaction effects between motivational and moral factors, such as individual morality and environmental factors of differential association with cyberbullying peers, are examined. Moreover, the roles of self-control and deterrence are investigated as internal and external control factors in situations where conflicts arise between an individual’s morality and the moral rules of their environment. The findings of this study support the assertions of SAT and demonstrate significant interaction effects between cyberbullying victimization and moral factors. Furthermore, consistent with SAT’s discussion on conflicts in the moral dimension, this study reveals that self-control functions as a control factor in situations where individuals possess high morality but are confronted with high levels of differential association with cyberbullying peers; however, the argument that deterrence operates in situations of low differential association with cyberbullying peers and low individual morality is not supported. Despite the partial verification of SAT, this theory is generally endorsed and offers utility in explaining cyberbullying. Full article

The style change detection (SCD) task asks to find the positions of authors’ style changes within multi-authored texts. It has several application areas, such as forensics, cybercrime, and literary analysis. Since 2017, SCD solutions in English have been actively investigated. However, to the best of our knowledge, this task has not yet been investigated in Arabic text. Moreover, most existing SCD solutions represent boundaries surrounding segments by concatenating them. This shallow concatenation may lose style patterns within each segment and also increase input lengths while several embedding models restrict these lengths. This study seeks to bridge these gaps by introducing an Edge Convolutional Neural Network for the Arabic SCD task (ECNN-ASCD) solution. It represents boundaries as standalone learnable parameters across layers based on graph neural networks. ECNN-ASCD was trained on an Arabic dataset containing three classes of instances according to difficulty level: easy, medium, and hard. The results show that ECNN-ASCD achieved a high $F_1$ score of 0.9945%, 0.9381%, and 0.9120% on easy, medium, and hard instances, respectively. The ablation experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of ECNN-ASCD components. As the first publicly available solution for Arabic SCD, ECNN-ASCD would open the door for more active research on solving this task and contribute to boosting research in Arabic NLP. Full article

The rapid growth of internet usage in daily life has led to a significant increase in cyber threats, with malicious URLs serving as a common cybercrime. Traditional detection methods often suffer from high false alarm rates and struggle to keep pace with evolving threats due to outdated feature extraction techniques and datasets. To address these limitations, we propose a deep learning-based approach aimed at developing an effective model for detecting malicious URLs. Our proposed method, the Char2B model, leverages a fusion of BERT and CharBiGRU embedding, further enhanced by a Conv1D layer with a kernel size of three and unit-sized stride and padding. After combining the embedding, we used the BERT model as a baseline for comparison. The study involved collecting a dataset of 87,216 URLs, comprising both benign and malicious samples sourced from the open project directory (DMOZ), PhishTank, and Any.Run. Models were trained using the training set and evaluated on the test set using standard metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Through iterative refinement, we optimized the model’s performance to maximize its effectiveness. As a result, our proposed model achieved 98.50% accuracy, 98.27% precision, 98.69% recall, and a 98.48% F1-score, outperforming the baseline BERT model. Additionally, the false positive rate of our model was 0.017 better than the baseline model’s 0.018. By effectively extracting and utilizing informative features, the model accurately classified URLs into benign and malicious categories, thereby improving detection capabilities. This study highlights the significance of our deep learning approach in strengthening cybersecurity by integrating advanced algorithms that enhance detection accuracy, bolster defense mechanisms, and contribute to a safer digital environment. Full article

As cyber threats escalate in scale and sophistication, the imperative to secure public data through theoretically grounded and practically viable frameworks becomes increasingly urgent. This review investigates whether and how criminology theories have effectively informed the development and implementation of information security management frameworks (ISMFs) to prevent cybercrime and fortify the digital ecosystem’s resilience. Anchored in a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 617 peer-reviewed records extracted from Scopus and Web of Science, the study employs Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), conceptual co-word mapping, and citation coupling to systematically chart the intellectual landscape bridging criminology and cybersecurity. The review reveals those foundational criminology theories—particularly routine activity theory, rational choice theory, and deterrence theory—have been progressively adapted to cyber contexts, offering novel insights into offender behaviour, target vulnerability, and systemic guardianship. In parallel, the study critically engages with global cybersecurity standards such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and ISO, to evaluate how criminological principles are embedded in practice. Using data from the Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI), the paper introduces an innovative visual mapping of the divergence between cybersecurity preparedness and digital development across 170+ countries, revealing strategic gaps and overperformers. This paper ultimately argues for an interdisciplinary convergence between criminology and cybersecurity governance, proposing that the integration of criminological logic into cybersecurity frameworks can enhance risk anticipation, attacker deterrence, and the overall security posture of digital public infrastructures. Full article

With the growing prevalence of cybercrime, botnets have emerged as a significant threat, infiltrating an increasing number of legitimate computers annually. Challenges arising for organizations, educational institutions, and individuals as a result of botnet attacks include distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, phishing attacks, and extortion attacks, generation of spam, and identity theft. The stealthy nature of botnets, characterized by constant alterations in network structures, attack methodologies, and data transmission patterns, poses a growing difficulty in their detection. This paper introduces an innovative strategy for mitigating botnet threats. Employing differential evolution, we propose a feature selection approach that enhances the ability to discern peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet traffic amidst evolving cyber threats. Differential evolution is a population-based meta-heuristic technique which can be applied to nonlinear and non-differentiable optimization problems owing to its fast convergence and use of few control parameters. Apart from that, an ensemble learning algorithm is also employed to support and enhance the detection phase, providing a robust defense against the dynamic and sophisticated nature of modern P2P botnets. The results demonstrate that our model achieves 99.99% accuracy, 99.49% precision, 98.98% recall, and 99.23% F1-score, which outperform the state-of-the-art P2P detection approaches. Full article

Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative innovation, providing a transparent, immutable, and decentralized platform that underpins critical applications across industries such as cryptocurrencies, supply chain management, healthcare, and finance. Despite their promise of enhanced security and trust, the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks has exposed vulnerabilities within blockchain ecosystems, posing severe threats to their integrity, reliability, and adoption. This study presents a comprehensive and systematic review of blockchain vulnerabilities by categorizing and analyzing potential threats, including network-level attacks, consensus-based exploits, smart contract vulnerabilities, and user-centric risks. Furthermore, the research evaluates existing countermeasures and mitigation strategies by examining their effectiveness, scalability, and adaptability to diverse blockchain architectures and use cases. The study highlights the critical need for context-aware security solutions that address the unique requirements of various blockchain applications and proposes a framework for advancing proactive and resilient security designs. By bridging gaps in the existing literature, this research offers valuable insights for academics, industry practitioners, and policymakers, contributing to the ongoing development of robust and secure decentralized ecosystems. Full article

As more IoT devices become connected to the Internet, the attack surface for cybercrimes expands, leading to significant security concerns for these devices. Existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs) designed to address these concerns often suffer from high rates of false positives and missed threats due to the presence of redundant and irrelevant information for the IDSs. Furthermore, recent IDSs that utilize artificial intelligence are often presented as black boxes, offering no explanation of their internal operations. In this study, we develop a solution to the identified challenges by presenting a deep learning-based model that adapts to new attacks by selecting only the relevant information as inputs and providing transparent internal operations for easy understanding and adoption by cybersecurity personnel. Specifically, we employ a hybrid approach using statistical methods and a metaheuristic algorithm for feature selection to identify the most relevant features and limit the overall feature set while building an LSTM-based model for intrusion detection. To this end, we utilize two publicly available datasets, NF-BoT-IoT-v2 and IoTID20, for training and testing. The results demonstrate an accuracy of 98.42% and 89.54% for the NF-BoT-IoT-v2 and IoTID20 datasets, respectively. The performance of the proposed model is compared with that of other machine learning models and existing state-of-the-art models, demonstrating superior accuracy. To explain the proposed model’s predictions and increase trust in its outcomes, we applied two explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) tools: Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), providing valuable insights into the model’s behavior. Full article

This study conducts a systematic literature review following the PRISMA framework and the guidelines of Kitchenham and Charters to analyze the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and deep learning models in monitoring violent actions and criminal activities in smart cities. A total of 45 studies published between 2010 and 2024 were selected, revealing that most research, primarily from India and China, focuses on cybersecurity in IoT networks (76%), while fewer studies address the surveillance of physical violence and crime-related events (17%). Advanced neural network models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and hybrid approaches, have demonstrated high accuracy rates, averaging over 97.44%, in detecting suspicious behaviors. These models perform well in identifying anomalies in IoT security; however, they have primarily been tested in simulation environments (91% of analyzed studies), most of which incorporate real-world data. From a legal perspective, existing proposals mainly emphasize security and privacy. This study contributes to the development of smart cities by promoting IoT-based security methodologies that enhance surveillance and crime prevention in cities in developing countries. Full article