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Malicious attacks, malware, and ransomware families pose critical security issues to cybersecurity, and it may cause catastrophic damages to computer systems, data centers, web, and mobile applications across various industries and businesses. Traditional anti-ransomware systems struggle to fight against newly created sophisticated attacks. Therefore, state-of-the-art techniques like traditional and neural network-based architectures can be immensely utilized in the development of innovative ransomware solutions. In this paper, we present a feature selection-based framework with adopting different machine learning algorithms including neural network-based architectures to classify the security level for ransomware detection and prevention. We applied multiple machine learning algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), Logistic Regression (LR) as well as Neural Network (NN)-based classifiers on a selected number of features for ransomware classification. We performed all the experiments on one ransomware dataset to evaluate our proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrate that RF classifiers outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, F -beta, and precision scores. 

The dark web is often discussed in taboo by many who are unfamiliar with the subject. However, this paper takes a dive into the skeleton of what constructs the dark web by compiling the research of published essays. The Onion Router (TOR) and other discussed browsers are specialized web browsers that provide anonymity by going through multiple servers and encrypted networks between the host and client, hiding the IP address of both ends. This provides difficulty in terms of controlling or monitoring the dark web, leading to its popularity in criminal underworlds. In this work, we provide an overview of data mining and penetration testing tools that are being widely used to crawl and collect data. We compare the tools to provide strengths and weaknesses of the tools while providing challenges of harnessing massive data from dark web using crawlers and penetration testing tools including machine learning (ML) techniques. Despite the effort to crawl dark web has progressed, there are still rooms to advance existing approaches to combat the ever-changing landscape of the dark web. 

Quantum Computing (QC) has gained immense popularity as a potential solution to deal with the ever-increasing size of data and associated challenges leveraging the concept of quantum random access memory (QRAM). QC promises quadratic or exponential increases in computational time with quantum parallelism and thus offer a huge leap forward in the computation of Machine Learning algorithms. This paper analyzes speed up performance of QC when applied to machine learning algorithms, known as Quantum Machine Learning (QML). We applied QML methods such as Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM), and Quantum Neural Network (QNN) to detect Software Supply Chain (SSC) attacks. Due to the access limitations of real quantum computers, the QML methods were implemented on open-source quantum simulators such as IBM Qiskit and TensorFlow Quantum. We evaluated the performance of QML in terms of processing speed and accuracy and finally, compared with its classical counterparts. Interestingly, the experimental results differ to the speed up promises of QC by demonstrating higher computational time and lower accuracy in comparison to the classical approaches for SSC attacks. 

Quantum Computing (QC) refers to an emerging paradigm that inherits and builds with the concepts and phenomena of Quantum Mechanic (QM) with the significant potential to unlock a remarkable opportunity to solve complex and computationally intractable problems that scientists could not tackle previously. In recent years, tremendous efforts and progress in QC mark a significant milestone in solving real-world problems much more efficiently than classical computing technology. While considerable progress is being made to move quantum computing in recent years, significant research efforts need to be devoted to move this domain from an idea to a working paradigm. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey and categorize papers, tools, frameworks, platforms that facilitate quantum computing and analyze them from an application and Quantum Computing perspective. We present quantum Computing Layers, Characteristics of Quantum Computer platforms, Circuit Simulator, Open-source Tools Cirq, TensorFlow Quantum, ProjectQ that allow implementing quantum programs in Python using a powerful and intuitive syntax. Following that, we discuss the current essence, identify open challenges and provide future research direction. We conclude that scores of frameworks, tools and platforms are emerged in the past few years, improvement of currently available facilities would exploit the research activities in the quantum research community. 

Software vulnerabilities have become a serious problem with the emergence of new applications that contain potentially vulnerable or malicious code that can compromise the system. The growing volume and complexity of software source codes have opened a need for vulnerability detection methods to successfully predict malicious codes before being the prey of cyberattacks. As leveraging humans to check sources codes requires extensive time and resources and preexisting static code analyzers are unable to properly detect vulnerable codes. Thus, artificial intelligence techniques, mainly deep learning models, have gained traction to detect source code vulnerability. A systematic review is carried out to explore and understand the various deep learning methods employed for the task and their efficacy as a prediction model. Additionally, a summary of each process and its characteristics are examined and its implementation on specific data sets and their evaluation will be discussed. 

With the rapid technological advancement, security has become a major issue due to the increase in malware activity that poses a serious threat to the security and safety of both computer systems and stakeholders. To maintain stakeholder’s, particularly, end user’s security, protecting the data from fraudulent efforts is one of the most pressing concerns. A set of malicious programming code, scripts, active content, or intrusive software that is designed to destroy intended computer systems and programs or mobile and web applications is referred to as malware. According to a study, naive users are unable to distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Thus, computer systems and mobile applications should be designed to detect malicious activities towards protecting the stakeholders. A number of algorithms are available to detect malware activities by utilizing novel concepts including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. In this study, we emphasize Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques for detecting and preventing malware activity. We present a detailed review of current malware detection technologies, their shortcomings, and ways to improve efficiency. Our study shows that adopting futuristic approaches for the development of malware detection applications shall provide significant advantages. The comprehension of this synthesis shall help researchers for further research on malware detection and prevention using AI. 

Traditional network intrusion detection approaches encounter feasibility and sustainability issues to combat modern, sophisticated, and unpredictable security attacks. Deep neural networks (DNN) have been successfully applied for intrusion detection problems. The optimal use of DNN-based classifiers requires careful tuning of the hyper-parameters. Manually tuning the hyperparameters is tedious, time-consuming, and computationally expensive. Hence, there is a need for an automatic technique to find optimal hyperparameters for the best use of DNN in intrusion detection. This paper proposes a novel Bayesian optimization-based framework for the automatic optimization of hyperparameters, ensuring the best DNN architecture. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show the framework’s effectiveness as the resultant DNN architecture demonstrates significantly higher intrusion detection performance than the random search optimization-based approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score. 

Machine Learning (ML) analyze, and process data and develop patterns. In the case of cybersecurity, it helps to better analyze previous cyber attacks and develop proactive strategy to detect, prevent the security threats. Both ML and cybersecurity are important subjects in computing curriculum but ML for security is not well presented there. We design and develop case-study based portable labware on Google CoLab for ML to cybersecurity so that students can access, share, collaborate, and practice these hands-on labs anywhere and anytime without time tedious installation and configuration which will help students more focus on learning of concepts and getting more experience for hands-on problem solving skills. 

Traditional Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) encounter difficulties due to the exponential growth of network traffic data and modern attacks' requirements. This paper presents a novel network intrusion classification framework using transfer learning from the VGG-16 pre-trained model. The framework extracts feature leveraging pre-trained weights trained on the ImageNet dataset in the initial step, and finally, applies a deep neural network to the extracted features for intrusion classification. We applied the presented framework on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion, to evaluate the proposed framework's performance. We also implemented other pre-trained models such as VGG19, MobileNet, ResNet-50, and Inception V3 to evaluate and compare performance. This paper also displays both binary classification (normal vs. attack) and multi-class classification (classifying types of attacks) for network intrusion detection. The experimental results show that feature extraction using VGG-16 outperforms other pre-trained models producing better accuracy, precision, recall, and false alarm rates. 

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs) play an essential role in the defense of computer networks by identifying a computer networks' unauthorized access and investigating potential security breaches. Traditional NIDSs encounters difficulties to combat newly created sophisticated and unpredictable security attacks. Hence, there is an increasing need for automatic intrusion detection solution that can detect malicious activities more accurately and prevent high false alarm rates (FPR). In this paper, we propose a novel network intrusion detection framework using a deep neural network based on the pretrained VGG-16 architecture. The framework, TL-NID (Transfer Learning for Network Intrusion Detection), is a two-step process where features are extracted in the first step, using VGG-16 pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and in the 2 nd step a deep neural network is applied to the extracted features for classification. We applied TL-NID on NSL-KDD, a benchmark dataset for network intrusion, to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively learn from the NSL-KDD dataset with producing a realistic performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and false alarm. This study also aims to motivate security researchers to exploit different state-of-the-art pre-trained models for network intrusion detection problems through valuable knowledge transfer.