Pete Burnap

Cardiff University | CU · School of Computer Science and Informatics

Moving target defense (MTD) strategies significantly protect power systems against stealthy false data injection attacks. However, traditional MTD approaches in power systems predominantly focus on single-parameter perturbation, leaving gaps in addressing the complexity and unpredictability of attack surfaces. In this work, we present a novel MTD s...

Dependency Modelling is an established Probabilistic Risk Analysis method that is frequently used to identify and quantify cyber risks in complex environments, such as Industrial Control Systems. The technique is useful for examining the interrelationships between different variables, but the limited data exposure in the modelling restricts its abi...

Cyber‐Physical Systems (CPSs) are becoming more automated and aimed to be as efficient as possible by enabling integration between their operations and Information Technology (IT) resources. In combination with production automation, these systems need to identify their assets and the correlation between them; any potential threats or failures aler...

Numerous sophisticated and nation-state attacks on Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) have increased in recent years, exemplified by Stuxnet and Ukrainian Power Grid. Measures to be taken post-incident are crucial to reduce damage, restore control, and identify attack actors involved. By monitoring Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), the incident respo...

Complex systems such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are designed as a collection of functionally dependent and highly connected units with multiple stakeholders. Identifying the risk of such complex systems requires an overall view of the entire system. Dependency modelling (DM) is a highly participative methodology that identifies the goals a...

To enable quantitative risk assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex and coupled IoT systems, a new epistemological equation is designed and tested though comparative and empirical analysis. The comparative analysis is conducted on national digital strategies, followed by an empirical analysis of cyber risk assessment approaches. The new...

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) are highly dependent on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) for process monitoring and control. Such SCADA systems are known to communicate using various insecure protocols such as Modbus, DNP3, and Open Platform Communication (OPC) Data Access standards (providing access to real-time automation...

The smart grid, regarded as the complex cyber-physical ecosystem of infrastructures, orchestrates advanced communication, computation, and control technologies to interact with the physical environment. Due to the high rewards that threats to the grid can realize, adversaries can mount complex cyber-attacks such as advanced persistent threats-based...

With the rapid progress and significant successes in various applications, machine learning has been considered a crucial component in the Internet of Things ecosystem. However, machine learning models have recently been vulnerable to carefully crafted perturbations, so-called adversarial attacks. A capable insider adversary can subvert the machine...

Analysts who work in a Security Operations Centre (SOC) play an essential role in supporting businesses to protect their computer networks against cyber attacks. To manage analysts efficiently and effectively, SOC managers and stakeholders use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to evaluate their performance. However, existing literature suggests a l...

This paper examines possible mechanisms behind the spike in racially or religiously-aggravated (RR) offences after the Brexit vote. It adds to the current literature in five significant ways: (1) it provides the first Brexit-related RR hate crime comparison between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; (2) it reports on results from a n...

This paper tests disruption strategies in Twitter networks containing malicious URLs used in drive-by download attacks. Cybercriminals use popular events that attract a large number of Twitter users to infect and propagate malware by using trending hashtags and creating misleading tweets to lure users to malicious webpages. Due to Twitter’s 280 cha...

There has been significant interest within the offshore oil and gas industry to utilise Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). There has also been a corresponding increase in cyberattacks targeted at oil and gas companies. Offshore oil production requires remote access to and control of large and complex...

Malware refers to software that is designed to achieve a malicious purpose usually to benefit its creator. To accomplish this, malware hides its true purpose from its target and malware analysts until it has established a foothold on the victim's machine. Malware analysts, therefore, have to find increasingly sophisticated methods to detect malware...

A key purpose of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is to enable either an on-site or remote supervisory control and monitoring of physical processes of various natures. In order for a SCADA system to operate safely and securely, a wide range of experts with diverse backgrounds must work in close rapport. It is critical to ha...

The offshore oil and gas industry has recently been going through a digitalisation drive, with use of `smart' equipment using technologies like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). There has also been a corresponding increase in cyber attacks targeted at oil and gas companies. Oil production offshor...

Hateful individuals and groups have increasingly been using the Internet to express their ideas, spread their beliefs, and recruit new members. Under- standing the network characteristics of these hateful groups could help understand individuals’ exposure to hate and derive intervention strategies to mitigate the dangers of such networks by disrupt...

Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) manage critical infrastructures by controlling the processes based on the “physics” data gathered by edge sensor networks. Recent innovations in ubiquitous computing and communication technologies have prompted the rapid integration of highly interconnected systems to ICPSs. Hence, the “security by obscurit...

Perimeter-based detection is no longer sufficient for mitigating the threat posed by malicious software. This is evident as antivirus (AV) products are replaced by endpoint detection and response (EDR) products, the latter allowing visibility into live machine activity rather than relying on the AV to filter out malicious artefacts. This paper argu...

In recent years, there has been increased interest in eventdetection using data posted to social media sites. Automaticallytransforming user-generated content into informationrelating to events is a challenging task due to the short informallanguage used within the content and the variety oftopics discussed on social media. Recent advances in detec...

Microblogging sites, such as Twitter, have become increasingly popular in recent years for reporting details of real world events via the Web. Smartphone apps enable people to communicate with a global audience to express their opinion and commentate on ongoing situations - often while geographically proximal to the event. Due to the heterogeneity...

To create products that are better fit for purpose, manufacturers require new methods for gaining insights into product experience in the wild at scale. “Chatty Factories” is a concept that explores the transformative potential of placing IoT-enabled data-driven systems at the core of design and manufacturing processes, aligned to the Industry 4.0...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) triggers data protection questions and new types of cyber risks. Cyber risk regulations for the IoT, however, are still in their infancy. This is concerning, because companies integrating IoT devices and services need to perform a self-assessment of its IoT cyber security posture. At present, there are no self-assessmen...

Machine learning based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) allow flexible and efficient automated detection of cyberattacks in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, this has also created an additional attack vector; the machine learning models which support the IDS’s decisions may also be subject to cyberattacks known as Adversarial Machine Lea...

This article presents three-tiered intrusion detection systems, which uses a supervised approach to detect cyber-attacks in industrial control systems networks. The proposed approach does not only aim to identify malicious packets on the network but also attempts to identify the general and finer grain attack type occurring on the network. This is...

With increasing automation of manufacturing processes (focusing on technologies such as robotics and human-robot interaction), there is a realisation that the manufacturing process and the artefacts/products it produces can be better connected post-production. Built on this requirement, a “chatty" factory involves creating products which are able t...

The proliferation and application of machine learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have allowed for more flexibility and efficiency in the automated detection of cyber attacks in Industrial Control Systems (ICS).However, the introduction of such IDSs has also created an additional attack vector; the learning models may also be subject to...

Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs) manage critical infrastructures by controlling the processes based on the "physics" data gathered by edge sensor networks. Recent innovations in ubiquitous computing and communication technologies have prompted the rapid integration of highly interconnected systems to ICPSs. Hence, the "security by obscurit...

Digital technologies have changed the way supply chain operations are structured. In this article, we conduct systematic syntheses of literature on the impact of new technologies on supply chains and the related cyber risks. A taxonomic/cladistic approach is used for the evaluations of progress in the area of supply chain integration in the Industr...

The Internet of Things (IoT) triggers new types of cyber risks. Therefore, the integration of new IoT devices and services requires a self-assessment of IoT cyber security posture. By security posture this article refers to the cybersecurity strength of an organisation to predict, prevent and respond to cyberthreats. At present, there is a gap in t...

Multiple governmental agencies and private organisations have made commitments for the colonisation of Mars. Such colonisation requires complex systems and infrastructure that could be very costly to repair or replace in cases of cyber-attacks. This paper surveys deep learning algorithms, IoT cyber security and risk models, and established mathemat...

Twitter has emerged as one of the most popular platforms to get updates on entertainment and current events. However, due to its 280-character restriction and automatic shortening of URLs, it is continuously targeted by cybercriminals to carry out drive-by download attacks, where a user’s system is infected by merely visiting a Web page. Popular ev...

Detecting exploits is crucial since the effect of undetected ones can be devastating. Identifying their presence on the network allows us to respond and block their malicious payload before they cause damage to the system. Inspecting the payload of network traffic may offer better performance in detecting exploits as they tend to hide their presenc...

In this article, we conduct a comprehensive study of online antagonistic content related to Jewish identity posted on Twitter between October 2015 and October 2016 by UK-based users. We trained a scalable supervised machine learning classifier to identify antisemitic content to reveal patterns of online antisemitism perpetration at the source. We b...

Forensic science is constantly evolving and transforming, reflecting the numerous technological innovations of recent decades. There are, however, continuing issues with the use of digital data, such as the difficulty of handling large-scale collections of text data. As one way of dealing with this problem, we used machine-learning techniques, part...

Multiple governmental agencies and private organisations have made commitments for the colonisation of Mars. Such colonisation requires complex systems and infrastructure that could be very costly to repair or replace in cases of cyber-attacks. This paper surveys deep learning algorithms, IoT cyber security and risk models, and established mathemat...

This paper presents a system developed during our participation (team name: scmhl5) in the TRAC-2 Shared Task on aggression identification. In particular, we participated in English Sub-task A on three-class classification ('Overtly Aggressive', 'Covertly Aggressive' and 'Non-aggressive') and English Sub-task B on binary classification for Misogyni...

The proliferation and application of machine learning based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have allowed for more flexibility and efficiency in the automated detection of cyber attacks in Industrial Control Systems (ICS). However, the introduction of such IDSs has also created an additional attack vector; the learning models may also be subject t...

Protection of networked computing infrastructures (such as Internet of Things, Industrial Control Systems, and Edge computing) is dependent on the continuous monitoring of interaction between such devices and network/Cloud‐based hosts (especially in Industry 4.0 environments). This real‐time monitoring enables an analyst to quantify evolving and em...

Multiple governmental agencies and private organisations have made commitments for the colonisation of Mars. Such colonisation requires complex systems and infrastructure that could be very costly to repair or replace in cases of cyber-attacks. This paper surveys deep learning algorithms, IoT cyber security and risk models, and established mathemat...

Cyber security operations centres (SOCs) are attracting much attention in recent times as they play a vital role in helping businesses to detect cyberattacks, maintain cyber situational awareness, and mitigate real-time cybersecurity threats. Literature often cites the monitoring of an enterprise network and the detection of cyberattacks as core fu...

The increasing use of Security Operations Centers (SOCs) by organisations as a part of their cyber security strategy has led to several studies aiming to understand and improve SOC operations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic literature review on the challenges faced by SOC analysts or on metrics for measuring analysts...

Offensive or antagonistic language targeted at individuals and social groups based on their personal characteristics (also known as cyber hate speech or cyberhate) has been frequently posted and widely circulated via the World Wide Web. This can be considered as a key risk factor for individual and societal tension surrounding regional instability....

Dynamic malware analysis is fast gaining popularity over static analysis since it is not easily defeated by evasion tactics such as obfuscation and polymorphism. During dynamic analysis it is common practice to capture the system calls that are made to better understand the behaviour of malware. There are several techniques to capture system calls,...

The authors regret that summary statistics reported in the original published version were incorrect. All summary statistics, including figures 4-7, have been corrected in the online and print version of the paper. © 2019 The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).

This paper explores ways in which the harmful effects of cyber hate may be mitigated through mechanisms for enhancing the self governance of new digital spaces. We report findings from a mixed methods study of responses to cyber hate posts, which aimed to: (i) understand how people interact in this context by undertaking qualitative interaction ana...

National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events. Using Computational Criminology that...

To explore possible distinctive features of online memorials for youth suicides, amid concerns about glorification, we compared public Facebook memorials for suicides and road traffic accident deaths, using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. People who posted on memorial sites wrote at greater length about suicides, using longer words and...

In traditional machine learning, classifiers training is typically un-dertaken in the setting of single-task learning, so the trained classi-fier can discriminate between different classes. However, this must be based on the assumption that different classes are mutually exclusive. In real applications, the above assumption does not always hold. Fo...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables enterprises to obtain profits from data but triggers data protection questions and new types of cyber risk. Cyber risk regulations for the IoT however do not exist. The IoT risk is not included in the cyber security assessment standards, hence, often not visible to cyber security experts. This is concerning, bec...

Sentiment analysis is a very popular application area of text mining and machine learning. The popular methods include Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Trees and Deep Neural Networks. However, these methods generally belong to discriminative learning, which aims to distinguish one class from others with a clear-cut outcome, under the p...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables enterprises to obtain profits from data but triggers data protection questions and new types of cyber risk. Cyber risk regulations for the IoT however do not exist. The IoT risk is not included in the cyber security assessment standards, hence, often not visible to cyber security experts. This is concerning, bec...