• Journal of Platform Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.26-37
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• 2021

E-mail is one of the important tools for communicating with people in everyday life. With COVID-19 (Coronavirus) increasing non-face-to-face activity, security incidents through e-mail such as spam, phishing, and ransomware are increasing. E-mail security incidents are increasing as social engineering attack using human psychology rather than arising from technological weaknesses that e-mails have. Security incidents using human psychology can be prevented and defended by improving security awareness. This study empirically studies the analysis of changes in response to malicious e-mail due to improved security awareness through malicious e-mail simulations on executives and employees of domestic and foreign company. In this study, the factors of security training, top-down security management, and security issue sharing are found to be effective in safely responding to malicious e-mail. This study presents a new study by conducting empirical analysis of theoretical research on security awareness in relation to malicious e-mail responses, and results obtained from simulations in a practical setting may help security work.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.23 no.8
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• pp.177-189
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• 2023

Malware detection is an increasingly important operational focus in cyber security, particularly given the fast pace of such threats (e.g., new malware variants introduced every day). There has been great interest in exploring the use of machine learning techniques in automating and enhancing the effectiveness of malware detection and analysis. In this paper, we present a deep recurrent neural network solution as a stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a pre-training as a regularization method to avoid random network initialization. In our proposal, we use global and short dependencies of the inputs. With pre-training, we avoid random initialization and are able to improve the accuracy and robustness of malware threat hunting. The proposed method speeds up the convergence (in comparison to stacked LSTM) by reducing the length of malware OpCode or bytecode sequences. Hence, the complexity of our final method is reduced. This leads to better accuracy, higher Mattews Correlation Coefficients (MCC), and Area Under the Curve (AUC) in comparison to a standard LSTM with similar detection time. Our proposed method can be applied in real-time malware threat hunting, particularly for safety critical systems such as eHealth or Internet of Military of Things where poor convergence of the model could lead to catastrophic consequences. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method on Windows, Ransomware, Internet of Things (IoT), and Android malware datasets using both static and dynamic analysis. For the IoT malware detection, we also present a comparative summary of the performance on an IoT-specific dataset of our proposed method and the standard stacked LSTM method. More specifically, of our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.1% in detecting IoT malware samples, with AUC of 0.985, and MCC of 0.95; thus, outperforming standard LSTM based methods in these key metrics.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.37-47
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• 2023

The growth of the metaverse has been accelerated by the increased demand for non-face-to-face interactions due to COVID-19 and advancements in technologies such as blockchain and NFTs. However, with the emergence of various metaverse platforms and the corresponding rise in users, criminal cases such as ransomware attacks, copyright infringements, and sexual offenses have occurred within the metaverse. Consequently, the need for artifacts that can be utilized as digital evidence within metaverse systems has increased. However, there is a lack of information about artifacts that can be used as digital evidence. Furthermore, metaverse security evaluation and forensic analysis are also insufficient, and the absence of attack scenarios and related guidelines makes forensics challenging. To address these issues, this paper presents artifacts that can be used for user behavior analysis and timeline analysis through dynamic analysis of Roblox, a representative metaverse gaming solution. Based on analyzing interrelationship between identified artifacts through memory forensics and log file analysis, this paper suggests the potential usability of artifacts in metaverse crime scenarios. Moreover, it proposes improvements by analyzing the current legal and regulatory aspects to address institutional deficiencies.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.165-172
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• 2023

Nation-state social engineering attacks are steadily being carried out as they are highly effective attacks, primarily to gain an advantage over secret information, diplomatic negotiations or future policy changes. As The Ukraine-Russia war prolongs, the activities of global hacking organizations are steadily increasing, and large-scale cyberattack attempts against major infrastructure or global companies continue, so a countermeasure strategy is needed. To this end, we determined that the social engineering attack cycle excluding physical contact among various social engineering models is the most suitable model, and analyzed the preferred social engineering attack method by comparing it with geopolitical tactics through case analysis. AS a result China favors phishing attacks, which prefer quantity over quality, such as man-made tactics, Russia prefers covert and complex spear phishing reminiscent of espionage warfare, and North Korea uses geopolitical tactics such as spear phishing and watering holes for attacks on the US and South Korea Most of the other countries aimed to secure funds with ransomware. Accordingly, a Clean Pass policy for China, periodic compulsory education in Russia, and international sanctions against North Korea were presented as countermeasure strategies.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2024

The IT environment is changing due to the acceleration of digital transformation in enterprises and organizations. This expansion of the digital space makes centralized cybersecurity controls more difficult. For this reason, cyberattacks are increasing in frequency and severity and are becoming more sophisticated, such as ransomware and digital supply chain attacks. Even in large organizations with numerous security personnel and systems, security incidents continue to occur due to unmanaged and unknown threats and vulnerabilities to IT assets. It's time to move beyond the current focus on detecting and responding to security threats to managing the full range of cyber risks. This requires the implementation of asset Inventory for comprehensive management by collecting and integrating all IT assets of the enterprise and organization in a wide range. IT Asset Management(ITAM) systems exist to identify and manage various assets from a financial and administrative perspective. However, the asset information managed in this way is not complete, and there are problems with duplication of data. Also, it is insufficient to update of data-set, including Network Infrastructure, Active Directory, Virtualization Management, and Cloud Platforms. In this study, we, the researcher group propose a new framework for automated 'Comprehensive IT Asset Management(CITAM)' required for security operations by designing a process to automatically collect asset data-set. Such as the Hostname, IP, MAC address, Serial, OS, installed software information, last seen time, those are already distributed and stored in operating IT security systems. CITAM framwork could classify them into unique device units through analysis processes in term of aggregation, normalization, deduplication, validation, and integration.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.99-107
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• 2024

In an environment where computer-related technologies are rapidly changing, cyber threats continue to emerge as they are advanced and diversified along with new technologies. Therefore, in this study, we would like to collect security-related news articles, conduct LDA topic modeling, and examine trends. To that end, news articles from January 2020 to August 2023 were collected and major topics were derived through LDA analysis. After that, the flow by topic was grasped and the main origin was analyzed. The analysis results show that ransomware attacks in 2021 and hacking of virtual asset exchanges in 2023 are major issues in the recent security sector. This allows you to check trends in security issues and see what research should be focused on in the future. It is also expected to be able to recognize the latest threats and support appropriate response strategies, contributing to the development of effective security measures.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.33-41
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• 2023

In recent years, advanced persistent threat (APT) attack organizations have exploited various vulnerabilities and attack techniques to target companies and institutions with national core technologies, distributing ransomware and demanding payment, stealing nationally important industrial secrets and distributing them on the black market (dark web), selling them to third countries, or using them to close the technology gap, requiring national-level security preparations. In this paper, we analyze the attack methods of attack organizations such as Kimsuky and Lazarus that caused industrial secrets leakage damage through APT attacks in Korea using the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and derive 26 cybersecurity-related administrative, physical, and technical security requirements that a company's security system should be equipped with. We also proposed a security framework and system configuration plan to utilize the security requirements in actual field. The security requirements presented in this paper provide practical methods and frameworks for security system developers and operators to utilize in security work to prevent leakage of corporate industrial secrets. In the future, it is necessary to analyze the advanced and intelligent attacks of various APT attack groups based on this paper and further research on related security measures.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.707-724
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• 2024

Recently, Golang has been gaining attention in programming language rankings each year due to its cross-compilation capabilities and high code productivity. However, malware developers have also been increasingly using it to distribute malware such as ransomware and backdoors. Interestingly, Golang, being an open-source language, frequently changes the important values and configuration order of a crucial structure called Pclntab, which includes essential values for recovering deleted symbols whenever a new version is released. While frequent structural changes may not be an issue from a developer's perspective aiming for better code readability and productivity, it poses challenges in cybersecurity, as new versions with modified structures can be exploited in malware development. Therefore, this paper proposes GoAsap, a detection and analysis system for Golang executables targeting the new versions, and validates the performance of the proposed system by comparing and evaluating it against six existing binary analysis tools.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.76-94
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• 2016

Recently in Korea, the importance of information security awareness has been receiving a growing attention. Attacks such as social engineering and ransomware are hard to be prevented because it cannot be solved by information security technology. Also, the profitability of information security industry has been decreasing for years. Therefore, many companies try to find a new growth-engine and an entry to the foreign market. The main purpose of this paper is to draw out some information security issues and to analyze them. Finally, this study identifies issues and suggests how to improve the situation in Korea. For this, topic modeling analysis has been used to find information security issues of each country. Moreover, the score of sentiment analysis has been used to compare them. The study is exploring and explaining what critical issues are and how to improve the situation based on the identified issues of the Korean information security industry. Also, this study is also demonstrating how text mining can be applied to the context of information security awareness. From a pragmatic perspective, the study has the implications for information security enterprises. This study is expected to provide a new and realistic method for analyzing domestic and foreign issues using the analysis of real data of the Twitter API.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.117-128
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• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior of North Korea's cyber attack against South Korea since 2009 based on major international security theories and suggest South Korea's policy option. For this purpose, this paper applied the behavioral domain and characteristics of 'cyber power' and 'coercion dynamics' model, which are attracting attention in international security studies. The types of cyber attacks from North Korea are classified into the following categories: power-based incarceration, leadership attacks and intrusions, military operations interference, and social anxiety and confusion. In terms of types and means of cyber power, North Korean GPS disturbance, the Ministry of Defense server hacking and EMP are hard power with high retaliation and threat and cyber money cashing and ransomware are analyzed by force in the act of persuasion and incentive in the point of robbing or asking for a large amount of money with software pawns. North Korea 's cyber attack has the character of escape from realistic sanctions based on the second nuclear test. It is important for South Korea to clearly recognize that the aggressive cyberpower of North Korea is changing in its methods and capabilities, and to ensure that North Korea's actions result in far greater losses than can be achieved. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen the cyber security and competence to simultaneously attack and defend through institutional supplement and new establishment such as cyber psychological warfare, EMP attack preparation, and enhancement of security expertise against hacking.