Over the last few decades, the Internet has brought about a myriad of benefits to almost every aspect of our daily lives. However, malware attacks have also widely proliferated, mainly aiming at legitimate network users, resulting in millions of dollars in damages if proper protection and response measures are not settled and enforced. In this context, the paper at hand proposes MalSEIRS, a novel dynamic model, to predict malware distribution in a network based on the SEIRS epidemiological model. (...) As a result, the time-dependent rates of infection, recovery, and loss of immunity enable us to capture the complex dynamism of malware spreading behavior, which is influenced by a variety of external circumstances. In addition, we describe both offensive and defensive techniques, based on the proposed MalSEIRS model, through extensive experimentation, as well as disclosing real-life malware campaigns that can be better understood by using the suggested model. (shrink)

As it is well known, mobile phones have become a basic gadget for any individual that usually stores sensitive information. This mainly motivates the increase in the number of attacks aimed at jeopardizing smartphones, being an extreme concern above all on Android OS, which is the most popular platform in the market. Consequently, a strong effort has been devoted for mitigating mentioned incidents in recent years, even though few researchers have addressed the application of visualization techniques for the analysis of (...) malware. Within this field, the present work proposes the extension of a new technique called Hybrid Unsupervised Exploratory Plots to visualize Android malware datasets. More precisely, the novel Beta-Hebbian Learning (BHL) method is applied for the first time and validated under the frame of Hybrid Unsupervised Exploratory Plots, in conjunction with clustering methods. The informative visualization achieved provides a picture of the structure of the malware families, allowing subsequent analysis of their organization. To validate the Hybrid Unsupervised Exploratory Plot extension and its tuning, the popular Android Malware Genome dataset has been used in the experimental setting. Promising results have been obtained, suggesting that BHL applied in combination with clustering techniques in Hybrid Unsupervised Exploratory Plots are a viable resource for the visualization of malware families. (shrink)

The paper addresses several issues in the morality of cyberwar and cyberwarfare, defined as one nation's attacks on the governmental or civilian information systems of another nation. It sketches the diverse technical ways in which an attack may occur, including denial-of-service attacks and the insertion of various forms of malware. It argues that existing international law and widely discussed principles of Just War Theory do not straightforwardly apply to cyberwarfare, and many forms of cyberwarfare differ from previous forms (...) of warfare in neither injuring nor killing human beings, nor causing lasting physical damage ? but can nevertheless cause serious harm to a nation's vital interests. Another dissimilarity with traditional warfare is in the degree of knowledge of the identity of an attacker (the ?attribution problem?). The paper argues that cyberwarfare is not amenable to regulation by international pacts and that we can expect long periods of low-level, multilateral cyberwarfare, a Cyber Cold War, as a game-theoretic equilibrium is sought,. The paper laments the lack of a cyberwarfare policy, and concludes that it is only by applying game-theoretic principles that strategies can be discovered that are both moral and effective in suppressing overall harm to all parties in the long run. (shrink)

Malicious programs have been the main actors in complex, sophisticated attacks against nations, governments, diplomatic agencies, private institutions and people. Knowledge about malicious program...

Cybersecurity technology has the ability to detect malware through a variety of methods, such as signature recognition, logical rules or the identification of known malware stored in a database or public source. However, threat actors continuously try to create new variants of existing malware by obfuscating or altering parts of the code to evade detection by antivirus engines. Infostealers are one of the most common malicious programs aimed at obtaining personal or banking information from an infected system (...) and exfiltrating it. In addition, they are the precursors of potentially high-security incidents because attackers gain a entry into companies’ internal systems and may even access them with administrator permissions. This article demonstrates how a feature vector can be obtained from the assembly code of a Windows binary and how a a Graph Neural Network can be used to determine, with ninety percent accuracy, whether it is an infostealer. (shrink)

In cloud security, intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the challenging research areas. In a cloud environment, security incidents such as denial of service, scanning, malware code injection, virus, worm, and password cracking are getting usual. These attacks surely affect the company and may develop a financial loss if not distinguished in time. Therefore, securing the cloud from these types of attack is very much needed. To discover the problem, this paper suggests a novel IDS established on (...) a combination of a leader-based k-means clustering (LKM), optimal fuzzy logic system. Here, at first, the input dataset is grouped into clusters with the use of LKM. Then, cluster data are afforded to the fuzzy logic system (FLS). Here, normal and abnormal data are inquired by the FLS, while FLS training is done by the grey wolf optimization algorithm through maximizing the rules. The clouds simulator and NSL-Knowledge Discovery and DataBase (KDD) Cup 99 dataset are applied to inquire about the suggested method. Precision, recall, and F-measure are conceived as evaluation criteria. The obtained results have denoted the superiority of the suggested method in comparison with other methods. (shrink)

This study explores the challenge of cyber security threats that e-commerce technology and business are facing. Technology applications for e-commerce are attracting attention from both academia and industry. It has made what was not possible before for the business community and consumers. But it did not come all alone but has brought some challenges, and cyber security challenge is one of them. Cyber security concerns have many forms, but this study focuses on social engineering, denial of services, malware, and (...) attacks on personal data. Firms worldwide spend a lot on addressing cybersecurity issues, which grow each year. However, it seems complicated to overcome the challenge because the attackers continuously search for new vulnerabilities in humans, organizations, and technology. This paper is based on the conceptual analysis of social engineering, denial of services, malware, and attacks on personal data. We argue that implementing modern technology for e-commerce and cybersecurity issues is a never-ending game of cat and mouse. To reduce risks, reliable technology is needed, training of employees and consumer is necessary for using the technology, and a strong policy and regulation is needed at the firm and governmental level. (shrink)

25 years ago, when AI & Society was launched, the emphasis was, and still is, on dehumanisation and the effects of technology on human life, including reliance on technology. What we forgot to take into account was another very great danger to humans. The pervasiveness of computer technology, without appropriate security safeguards, dehumanises us by allowing criminals to steal not just our money but also our confidential and private data at will. Also, denial-of-service attacks prevent us from accessing the information (...) we need when we want it. We are being dehumanised not by the technology but by criminals who use the ubiquity of the technology and its lack of security to steal from us and prevent us from doing what we want. What is more interesting is that this malevolent use of the technology doesn’t come from monolithic corporate structures eager to control our lives but mainly from individuals keen to demonstrate their knowledge of the technology for social networking purposes. The aim of this paper is to turn the clock back 25 years and present an alternative perspective: the single, biggest threat of dehumanisation is not the pervasiveness and ubiquity of computers but the lack of ensuring that humans are provided with the basic security they need for using the technology safely and securely. Cyberspace is not a safe space to be. This was something that even far-sighted researcher colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s overlooked. The paper will explore where we went wrong 25 years ago in our predictions and concerns. We will also present a scenario that allows future generations to have a safer cyberworld. (shrink)

Malware has been around since the 1980s and is a large and expensive security concern today, constantly growing over the past years. As our social, professional and financial lives become more digitalised, they present larger and more profitable targets for malware. The problem of classifying and preventing malware is therefore urgent, and it is complicated by the existence of several specific approaches. In this paper, we use an existing malware taxonomy to formulate a general, language independent (...) functional description of malware as transformers between states of the host system and described by a trust relation with its components. This description is then further generalised in terms of mechanisms, thereby contributing to a general understanding of malware. The aim is to use the latter in order to present an improved classification method for malware. (shrink)

The suggestion has been made that future advanced artificial intelligence (AI) that passes some consciousness-related criteria should be treated as having moral status, and therefore, humans would have an ethical obligation to consider its well-being. In this paper, the author discusses the extent to which software and robots already pass proposed criteria for consciousness; and argues against the moral status for AI on the grounds that human malware authors may design malware to fake consciousness. In fact, the article (...) warns that malware authors have stronger incentives than do authors of legitimate software to create code that passes some of the criteria. Thus, code that appears to be benign, but is in fact malware, might become the most common form of software to be treated as having moral status. (shrink)

Automatic public malware analysis services provide controlled, isolated and virtual environments to analyse malicious software samples. Unfortunately, malware is currently incorporating techniques to recognize execution onto a virtual or sandbox environment; when an analysis environment is detected, malware behaves as a benign application or even shows no activity. In this work, we present an empirical study and characterization of automatic PMAS, considering 26 different services. We also show a set of features that allow to easily fingerprint these (...) services as analysis environments; the lower the unlikeability of these features, the easier for us to fingerprint the analysis service they belong to. Finally, we propose a method for these analysis services to counter or at least mitigate our proposal. (shrink)

Present research proposes the application of unsupervised and supervised machine-learning techniques to characterize Android malware families. More precisely, a novel unsupervised neural-projection method for dimensionality-reduction, namely, Beta Hebbian Learning, is applied to visually analyze such malware. Additionally, well-known supervised Decision Trees are also applied for the first time in order to improve characterization of such families and compare the original features that are identified as the most important ones. The proposed techniques are validated when facing real-life Android (...) class='Hi'>malware data by means of the well-known and publicly available Malgenome dataset. Obtained results support the proposed approach, confirming the validity of BHL and DTs to gain deep knowledge on Android malware. (shrink)

Malware is a sophisticated, malicious, and sometimes unidentifiable application on the network. The classifying network traffic method using machine learning shows to perform well in detecting malware. In the literature, it is reported that this good performance can depend on a reduced set of network features. This study presents an empirical evaluation of two statistical methods of reduction and selection of features in an Android network traffic dataset using six supervised algorithms: Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, multilayer perceptron (...) neural network, decision tree, random forest, and K-nearest neighbors. The principal component analysis and logistic regression methods with p value were applied to select the most representative features related to the time properties of flows and features of bidirectional packets. The selected features were used to train the algorithms using binary and multiclass classification. For performance evaluation and comparison metrics, precision, recall, F-measure, accuracy, and area under the curve were used. The empirical results show that random forest obtains an average accuracy of 96% and an AUC-ROC of 0.98 in binary classification. For the case of multiclass classification, again random forest achieves an average accuracy of 87% and an AUC-ROC over 95%, exhibiting better performance than the other machine learning algorithms. In both experiments, the 13 most representative features of a mixed set of flow time properties and bidirectional network packets selected by LR were used. In the case of the other five classifiers, their results in terms of precision, recall, and accuracy, are competitive with those obtained in related works, which used a greater number of input features. Therefore, it is empirically evidenced that the proposed method for the selection of features, based on statistical techniques of reduction and extraction of attributes, allows improving the identification performance of malware traffic, discriminating it from the benign traffic of Android applications. (shrink)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing technology that connects everyday devices to the Internet, enabling wireless, low-consumption and low-cost communication and data exchange. IoT has revolutionized the way devices interact with each other and the internet. The more devices become connected, the greater the risk of security breaches. There is currently a need for new approaches to algorithms that can detect malware regardless of the size of the network and that can adapt to dynamic changes in the (...) network. Through the use of a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm, this paper proposes a novel algorithm for malware detection in IoT devices. The proposed algorithm is not strongly dependent on the size of the IoT network due to the that its training is adapted using time differences if the IoT network size is small or Monte Carlo otherwise. To validate the proposed algorithm in an environment as close to reality as possible, we proposed a scenario based on a real IoT network, where we tested different malware propagation models. Different simulations varying the number of agents and nodes in the IoT network have been developed. The result of these simulations proves the efficiency and adaptability of the proposed algorithm in detecting malware, regardless of the malware propagation model. (shrink)

This paper poses a constructive, evenhanded challenge to the idea that recent experimental work shows intuitions to be epistemically problematic. It is a challenge because it suggests that these experimental attacks neglect a considerable gap between intuitions and answers, and this neglect implies that we are at the present time unwarranted in drawing any negative conclusions about intuition’s epistemic status from the relevant empirical studies. The challenge is evenhanded because it does not load the dice by invoking an overly narrow (...) conception of intuition. Finally, the challenge is constructive: it is not an exercise in idle skepticism, but rather explores concrete implications and applications. These include (i) a practical lesson that may help experimentalists in their efforts to study intuitions empirically, (ii) methodological counsel that may help rationalists in their efforts to intuit responsibly, and (iii) a novel explanation of the relevant empirical studies that may actually support rather than undermine intuition’s epistemic status—perhaps, however, to the detriment of the epistemic status of answers. (shrink)

Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call "cognitive integration," which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists (...) think that they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes. The internalist criticisms of the manipulation thesis fail because they misconstrue the nature of manipulation, ignore the hybrid nature of cognition, and take the manipulation thesis to be dependent upon a weak parity principle. (shrink)

Dalawa sa mga hibla ng Pilosopiyang Filipino ay patungkol sa paggamit ng banyagang pilosopiya at pamimilosopiya sa wikang Filipino. Makatutulong ang dalawang ito tungo sa pagsasalin ng mga banyagang kaisipan sa talastasang bayan. Ang dalawang hiblang ito ang nais na ambagan ng kasalukuyang sanaysay, sa pamamagitan ng pagsasagawa ng rebyu sa isang halimbawa ng anime/manga na Hapon: ang Attack on Titan (AOT) ni Hajime Isayama. Gagamitin sa pagbasa ng AOT ang mga pilosopikal na pananaw ng ilang Aleman/Austrianong pilosoper/sikolohista na (...) sina Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Carl Schmitt, at Friedrich Nietzsche. Sa pagbasang ito sa pamamagitan ng apat na banyagang palaisip, tututukan ang tema ng kalayaan at digmaan. Liban dito, maglalatag din ng pagmumuni-muni ukol sa paksa ng pananangkapan sa kasaysayan bilang sandatang pulitikal, isang temang lantad na lantad rin sa AOT. Ang lahat ng ito ay isasagawa sa wikang Filipino, bilang pagtatangka na makapag-ambag sa pagpapasok ng anime/manga na Hapon at pilosopiyang Aleman/Austriano sa talastasang bayan. (shrink)

The recent literature on ad hominem argument contends that the speaker’s character is sometimes relevant to evaluating what she says. This effort to redeem ad hominems requires an analysis of character that explains why and how character is relevant. I argue that virtue epistemology supplies this analysis. Three sorts of ad hominems that attack the speaker’s intellectual character are legitimate. They attack a speaker’s: (1) possession of reliabilist vices; or (2) possession of responsibilist vices; or (3) failure to (...) perform intellectually virtuous acts. Legitimate ad hominems conclude that we should not believe what a speaker says solely on her say-so. (shrink)

The book examines the psycho-religious mechanism behind the violent extremism of suicide attacks in the post-9/11 world. It employs the mindsponge concept, an original dataset, and original research results obtained from the authors' statistical investigations using the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo technique. It provides insights and implications for policymakers and strategists in their efforts to engage in peace talks and reduce violent conflicts worldwide.

In the current paper we re-examine the concepts of attack semantics and collective attacks in abstract argumentation, and examine how these concepts interact with each other. For this, we systematically map the space of possibilities. Starting with standard argumentation frameworks (which consist of a directed graph with nodes and arrows) we briefly state both node semantics and arrow semantics (the latter a.k.a. attack semantics) in both their extensions-based form and labellings-based form. We then proceed with SETAFs (which consist (...) of a directed hypergraph of nodes and arrows, to take into account the notion of collective attacks) and state both node semantics and arrow semantics, in both their extensions-based and labellings-based form. We then show equivalence between the extensions-based and labellings-based form, for node semantics and arrow semantics of AFs, as well as for node semantics and arrow semantics of SETAFs. Moreover, we show equivalence between node semantics and arrow semantics for AFs, and equivalence between node semantics and arrow semantics for SETAFs (with the notable exception of semi-stable). We also provide a novel way of converting a SETAF to an AF such that semantics are preserved, without the use of any “meta arguments”. Although the main part of our work is on the level of abstract argumentation, we do provide an application of our theory on the instantiated level. More specifically, we show that the classical characterisation of Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) can be seen as an instantiation based on a SETAF, whereas the contemporary characterisation of ABA can be seen as an instantiation based on a standard AF. Our theory of how to convert a SETAF to an AF can then be used to account for both the similarities and the differences between the classical and contemporary characterisations of ABA. Most prominently, our theory is able to explain the semantic mismatch for semi-stable semantics that arises in the ABA instantiation process. (shrink)

Why are personal attacks so powerful? In political debates, speeches, discussions and campaigns, negative character judgments, aggressive charges and charged epithets are used for different purposes. They can block the dialogue, trigger value judgments and influence decisions; they can force the interlocutor to withdraw a viewpoint or undermine his arguments. Personal attacks are not only multifaceted dialogical moves, but also complex argumentative strategies. They can be considered as premises for further arguments based on signs, generalizations or consequences. They involve tactics (...) for arousing emotions such as fear, hate or contempt, or for ridiculing the interlocutor. The twofold level of investigation presented in this paper is aimed at distinguishing the different roles that ad hominem have in a dialogue and bringing to light their hidden dimensions. The reasoning structure of each type of attack will be distinguished from the tactics used to increase its effectiveness and conceal its weaknesses. (shrink)

Insults elicit intense emotion. This study tests the hypothesis that one's social image, which is especially salient in honour cultures, influences the way in which one reacts to an insult. Seventy-seven honour-oriented and 72 non-honour oriented participants answered questions about a recent insult episode. Participants experienced both anger and shame in reaction to the insult. However, these emotions resulted in different behaviours. Anger led to verbal attack (i.e., criticising, insulting in return) among all participants. This relationship was explained by (...) participants’ motivation to punish the wrongdoer. Shame, on the other hand, was moderated by honour. Shame led to verbal disapproval of the wrongdoers behaviour, but only among the honour-oriented participants. This relationship was explained by these participants’ motivation to protect their social image. By contrast, shame led to withdrawal among non-honour-oriented participants. (shrink)

Liberalism is today under attack. This attack is being fought along two fronts, and so appears to be coming from different directions, but it is actually coming exclusively from the right. One source is Islamic fundamentalism, and the other is American neo-conservatism, which in turn unites elements of Christian fundamentalism with elements of neo-Platonic political philosophy and neo-Aristotelian moral theory. Both Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism are perfectionist views, and while perfectionist attacks on liberalism are nothing new, there (...) is a special danger in the position that liberalism currently finds itself. Although bitterly opposed to each other and divided by utterly incompatible substantive views, these two sources of attack share many similarities at a more fundamental level of political theory. The purpose of this paper is accordingly to focus our attention on the similarities between these seemingly opposing perfectionist views, and to defend liberalism against one of the most serious accusations that perfectionists from both camps make against it—the claim that liberalism leads to nihilism. (shrink)

The attack-and-defense game is a game in which an attacker has an incentive to revise the status quo and a defender wants to protect it. The asymmetry in objectives creates incompatible interests and results in a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. However, this equilibrium could be heavily impacted by behavioral considerations.

The article deals with the role of Russian culture in the period of the RF war against Ukraine. The history is considered as the basic structure that shapes the discursive foundation of identity. Historical narratives as well as the cultural background of imperial identity and risks of the full scale representation of Russian culture in the Ukrainian social consciousness are analyzed. The two tendencies are also comprehended — junk science foundation of geopolitical projects and devalu- ation of the historically formed (...) senses. So the communicative action is penetrated by the strategic action bazed on the false reality fundament, this significant element of the war of the world. The vivid example of junk science is the neoeurasian ideology, that defines the strategy of Kremlin informational attack on the Ukrainian identity. Standoff between the identities takes place in the course of the imperial mobilization project development. The symbiosis of governmental authorities and artists plays the key role in its realization. The author outlines the main features of the strategic effect of penetration into the core of communicative process and the false reality building. Also the author develops the thought that the heartbreaking and impetuous change of con- tradictory narratives are the one of the fundamental resources of information war. In particular it deals with the great Russian Simulacrum as the vivid example of the instrumental reason that is in the base of the information war against Ukraine. It is also defined the historical origin of the simulacra as the instrument of the Russian special services and the role of their partners — the iconic figures of the Russian literature — in the projects of the public opinion manipulation. (shrink)

Role-based database management systems are most widely used for information storage and analysis but are known as vulnerable to insider attacks. The core of intrusion detection lies in an adaptive system, where an insider attack can be judged if it is different from the predicted role by performing classification on the user’s queries accessing the database and comparing it with the authorized role. In order to handle the high similarity of user queries for misclassified roles, this paper proposes a (...) deep metric neural network with strategic sampling algorithm that properly extracts salient features and directly learns a quantitative measure of similarity. A strategic sampling method of heuristically generating and learning training pairs through Monte Carlo search is proposed to select a training pair that can represent the entire dataset. With the TPC-E–based benchmark data trained with 11,000 queries for 11 roles, the proposed model produces the classification accuracy of 95.41%, which is the highest compared with the previous models. The results are verified through comparison of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and the feature space modelled in the neural network is analysed by t-SNE algorithm. (shrink)

This essay examines and challenges some of the theoretical arguments of the neoliberal attack on the concept of popular sovereignty. I argue that in order to resist both the neoliberal reaction against popular power and the subsequent resurgence of populist rhetoric, we need to rework the concept of popular sovereignty. I focus on three groups of texts written in the early years of the neoliberal shift—namely, from the mid-1970s to early 1980s—which deal with the question of sovereignty: Hayek’s Law, (...) Legislation and Liberty; Foucault’s works of the late 1970s; and Lefort’s reflections on the symbolic dimension of power. While Hayek and Foucault defend similar views on sovereignty and argue that it is or should be replaced by technics of management, Lefort proposes a de-essentialized conception of democracy based on redefining sovereignty as the possibility of continually refiguring the space of power. (shrink)

This study applies functional theory of campaign discourse proposed by William Benoit for United States political debates and the theory of illocutions to the televised governorship debate of Lagos State. As opposed to other studies that have applied it to the United States, Finland, etc., it applies this theory to an African political debate. It asserts as against others that candidates distinguish themselves from their opponents using the major functions of campaign discourse in a reversed order, that is, attacks, defences (...) and acclaims rather than acclaims, attacks and defences which is popular in US debates. Furthermore, it also examines how attacks are pragmatically encoded by candidates in Lagos State debate, what illocutionary forms candidates utilize when informing voters of an opponent’s potential costs/weakness. Thus, this current study can be viewed as a comparative study that aims to unravel a sequence present in Nigerian debate different from what is obtainable in US political debates. (shrink)

This study is based on a corpus of duel songs from the traditional Ammassalik culture, published by the anthropologists P.-É. Victor and J. Robert-Lamblin. In this culture, the duel is a moment in the development of a quarrel, originating in a conflictual event; one of the partners challenges the other to a song duel. Our study focuses upon the basic argumentative strategies of defense and counter attack used to reject the accusation. The charges range from what may seem to (...) us the most serious ones, to apparently the most frivolous. The defensive strategies range from serious replies to mere jokes, making fun of the opponent. Formally, the reproached action can be denied, or acknowledged and rejected on other grounds. The defendant often just counter-attacks, either by disqualifying the accuser, or by reversing the charge. The data shows that the duel song is not essentially a “court of assize”. Beyond its cathartic function, the duel is show given by the participants to a participating audience. (shrink)

Recent examples of attacks on science-such as climate change denial and anti-vaccination movements-demonstrate the danger of attacks on science. However, the negative impacts of these attacks must be weighed against other considerations, including the freedom of speech and religious expression and the assertion that some criticism is healthy for the scientific field. The viewpoints in this title consider the impacts of attacks on science, whether these attacks can be stopped, and how they can be prevented. It also examines the role (...) of the internet in propagating and legitimizing these attacks. (shrink)

When war becomes perception attack, and perception is attacked ecologically ; when the ecology is of experience dawning, and the dawning modulates what will become ; when that modulation inhabits an untimely, « eternitarian » lapse, and in that lapse we « recollect forward » a world of conflict ; when that forwarding of a world of conflict plies the « full spectrum », expressing itself as a force of life – then the machinery of war arrogates to itself (...) ontoproductive powers of emergent futurity. It claims « shocking » chaosmotic ontopower. (shrink)

Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza in December 2008—January 2009 exposed a paradox: the attack was not only one of the most violent and destructive of Israel’s recent wars on the Palestinians and the one most strongly opposed by its critics, but also the one in which Israeli experts in international humanitarian law (IHL) — the area of the law that regulates the conduct of war — were most closely involved. The article demonstrates how these facts are connected.

In the recent years, an alarming rise in the incidence of cyber attacks has made cyber security a major concern for nations across the globe. Given the current volatile socio-political environment and the massive increase in the incidence of terrorism, it is imperative that government agencies rapidly realize the possibility of cyber space exploitation by terrorist organizations and state players to disrupt the normal way of life. The threat level of cyber terrorism has never been as high as it is (...) today, and this has created a lot of insecurity and fear. This study has focused on different aspects of cyber attacks and explored the reasons behind their increasing popularity among the terrorist organizations and state players. This study proposes an empirical model that can be used to estimate the risk levels associated with different types of cyber attacks and thereby provide a road map to conceptualize and formulate highly effective counter measures and cyber security policies. (shrink)

The quality of our public discourse – think of the climate change debate for instance – is never very high. A day spent observing it reveals a litany of misrepresentation and error, argumentative fallacy, and a general lack of good will. In this paper I focus on a microcosmic aspect of these practices: the use of two types of argument – the argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority – and a way in which they are related. Public debate is (...) so contaminated by the misuse of the ad hominem tactic that it is important to have an understanding of one of the ways in which its use may be legitimate. So readers who might have expected an analysis of the ad hominem fallacy will, on the contrary, be presented with an account of one of the places for its potential success. In ad hominem, arguers are viewed as legitimate constitutive targets for their own argument; in authority arguments, arguers provide a legitimate constitutive warrant for an argument they deploy. These types of argument are connected in so far as the identities of persons deploying them carry the cognitive weight of the argument. If authority arguments sometimes deserve to succeed, ad hominem attacks on them are potentially legitimate. An important motivation for this analysis is that in identifying the success conditions for one of the ad hominem types we attain some clarity in the evaluation of their use. (shrink)

This book is thus a battle of wits. . . . [A] vivid sketch of the conflict between two basic outlooks."—Library Journal "[O]ne leaves this book feeling enriched and challenged.

Science has been under attack ever since William Blake and Romantic movement. In our time, criticisms of modern science have led to Alan Sokal's spoof, and the so-called science wars. Both sides missed the point. Science deserves to be criticized for seriously misrepresenting its highly problematic aims, which have metaphysical, value and political assumptions associated with them. Instead of repressing these problematic aims, science ought rather to make them explicit, so that they can be critically assessed and, we may (...) hope, improved. (shrink)

This commentary complements the article by De Dreu and Gross from the perspectives of behavioral economics and game theory. It aims to provide a bridge between psychology/neuroscience research and economics research in attack-and-defense by stipulating relevant literature, clarifying theoretical structures, and suggesting improvements in experimental designs and possible further investigations.

We present an interdisciplinary approach to study systematic relations between logical form and attacks between claims in an argumentative framework. We propose to generalize qualitative attack principles by quantitative ones. Specifically, we use coherent conditional probabilities to evaluate the rationality of principles which govern the strength of argumentative attacks. Finally, we present an experiment which explores the psychological plausibility of selected attack principles.

The most famous and successful teacher of rhetoric at Athens in the fourth century was Isocrates, and he claimed for rhetoric an educational importance which Plato considered to be unmerited and misleading. He made rhetoric the basis of his whole educational system and claimed to teach his pupils to become not only good rhetoricians but good citizens. Plato attacked both aspects of this theory of education. In the Gorgias he exposed the claim of rhetoric to be considered valuable as an (...) instrument of education by showing that rhetorical excellence had no necessary connection with moral excellence. In the Protagoras he exposed the inconsistency of those who claimed to teach men to be good citizens—to teach πολιτιк τ?νη—without an absolute standard of moral values. Even if we believe that in the Gorgias and the Protagoras, as in other dialogues, Plato is representing faithfully the constructive views of the historic Socrates, we can hardly believe that he was unaware of the contemporary relevance of those views, and it is significant that he thought fit to publish them in the form of an attack on a teacher of rhetoric and an attack on a teacher of <ολιτικ τνη At any rate it is reasonable to suppose that the Athenian reading public would expect to find such a contemporary relevance and that they would interpret these attacks as being, in some measure at least, directed against Isocrates. (shrink)

A gradual semantics takes a weighted argumentation framework as input and outputs a final acceptability degree for each argument, with different semantics performing the computation in different manners. In this work, we consider the problem of attack inference. That is, given a gradual semantics, a set of arguments with associated initial weights, and the final desirable acceptability degrees associated with each argument, we seek to determine whether there is a set of attacks on those arguments such that we can (...) obtain these acceptability degrees. The main contribution of our work is to demonstrate that the associated decision problem, i.e., whether a set of attacks can exist which allows the final acceptability degrees to occur for given initial weights, is NP-complete for the weighted h-categoriser and card-based semantics, and is polynomial for the weighted max-based semantics, even for the complete version of the problem (where all initial weights and final acceptability degrees are known). We then briefly discuss how this decision problem can be modified to find the attacks themselves and conclude by examining the partial problem where not all initial weights or final acceptability degrees may be known. (shrink)

Starting from René Girard and Philippe Muray’s thoughts on terrorism, the present paper introduces the hypothesis that the re-sacralization of the hyperfestive1 era is the unexpected but seemingly inevitable effect of jihadist attacks in Europe. These assumptions aim to shed new light on the Western rhetoric of commemorative events and media discourses.

Is there a strategic mechanism that explains role-contingent differences in conflict behavior? I sketch a theory in which differences in optimal behavior for attackers and defenders arise under initially symmetric conditions through the dynamic accumulation of differences in the distributions of traits in the subpopulations of potential opponents.

The target article focuses on how attacker-defender conflicts are fought. This commentary complements it by considering how attacker-defender conflicts may be resolved at the bargaining table. I highlight multiple linkages between asymmetric intergroup conflict as modeled with the attacker-defender game and negotiation research and illustrate how the proposed model of attacker-defender conflicts can inspire new research on intergroup negotiation.