Dante Scaramazzo
Professor Edwin Armistead
CYSE201
10/30/2022
Article Reviews
Journal 1: International Journal of Criminology
“LGBTQ Cyberbullying onOnline Learning Platforms Among University Students”
By: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pannee Suanpang, Jatupon dongjit, Asst. Prof. Dr. Titiya Netwong
This article discusses the LGBQT community and how they’ve been affected by cyberbullying. While there have been studies done on this topic previously, this study focused specifically on college aged students. The author’s hypothesis was that, “The personal factor of the students has significance for the outcome of cyberbullying of the LGBTQ group.” (page 8) The authors hope that this study will align with the principles of the social sciences and help protect members of the LGBTQ community from cyberbullying and online harassment, and hope to figure out why this group is being targeted. Throughout this study, researchers used many methods to help them back up their claims and reach a conclusion. First, they did plenty of background research that discussed similar and related topics. Then, they set up a quantitative study, where their population consisted of 400 undergraduate students in Thailand. They collected their data through online questionnaires, where the participants were asked if they had ever experienced cyberbullying, if they believed cyberbullying was an issue that affected people, and if they believed it was a common occurrence online. This study contained four latent variables and seventeen observable variables. The results showed that 57.75% of the respondents had never experienced cyberbullying, 25% believed that cyberbullying was a problem that effected people, and 8.50% believed that cyberbullying was a common online occurrence. This study showed that a shockingly low number of the participants were unaware of the bullying going on online to fellow LGBTQ peers. This in itself is an issue, showing that most people are oblivious to how ugly the cyberbullying scene is, even on their own campus, and contribute to a problem nationally and even globally. If society overall is unaware of the online issue, then LGBTQ members are left with few outlets to voice their concerns to. This also speaks to issues pertaining the LGBTQ community, showing the struggles of being apart of the community, and highlights the detrimental effects of cyberbullying, such as lower grades in school, drug addiction, declining mental health, and in the worst cases, suicide. This study should help bring awareness to those who are struggling, and hopefully help people be more perceptive and vigilant in noticing harassment online. The concept of cyber bullying is related to the article, which has been discussed in class. Also, the reasoning behind why those participate in cyber bullying has been discussed in class which can be used as background information when reading this article. These concepts helped me build a broad idea in my head of why this is taking place against the LGBTQ group as I read the article.
https://cybercrimejournal.com/menuscript/index.php/cybercrimejournal/article/view/15/6
Journal 2: International Journal of Cybersecurity and Cybercrime
“Kerberoasting: Case Studies of an Attack on a Cryptographic Authentication Technology”
By: D Demers and Hannarae Lee
This article is a research paper done on something called Kerberoasting, which is a post-exploitation attack technique that attempts to crack the password of a service account within the Active Directory. The article discusses the dangers behind this, and talks about how we can protect ourselves against attacks. This relates to the social sciences by helping protect computer users from attacks such as the examples they give in this article. The authors used previouis research studies along with their own research to help build this paper, finding evidence of previous attacks and studying how to help. They discovered that the first Kerberoasting attack occurred in 2014, and that it is one of the most common attacks among domain users. The reason they are so prevalent is because they are easy to learn and the nature of these attacks protects them from getting detected. The authors also did extensive research into a Chinese based hacking group, known as Operation Wocao. Wocao first used PowerSploit’s Invoke Mimikatz module to try and extract Kerberos tickets from the system’s memory. They then used PowerSploit’s Invoke-Kerberoast module to try to solicit credentials. Finally, Wocao then used the obtained privileges from the successful Keberoasting-based attacks to exfiltrate data of interest in the system before covering their footprints and cutting access. All of these steps taken by Wocao helped them get background intel into how these Keberoasting attacks were performed, and helped them understand the information these attacks were collecting. The authors studied multiple other attacks performed with Keberoasting, and covered some of the most infamous attacks, including The Email attack and The download attack. The email attack took a total of 29 hours, which involved demanding 600 dollars in bitcoin, the equivalent of over 6 million dollars. The download attack, on the other hand, only took 2 hours. The authors then explained how to prevent these attacks and how to detect that one might be occurring. Online users should be aware of any suspicious activity, such as accounts making several requests in a short period of time. Another way to stay on guard is to create a fake account intentionally designed to be alluring to an adversary that can be used to detect suspicious activity. The third option is to use a third-party monitoring technology such as those offered by Qomplx or Awake Security Platform. Ultimately, users want to make sure they have network security above all else. Some easy ways to do that is employ the use of authentication which can verify whether it’s you logging into an account. This article can help users who may not be as aware of cybersecurity and online safety, as well as society as a whole. Many people may not be aware of the risks of Keberoasting and how at risk their online information may be to such attacks. Informing the public about security issues such as these can help people be more informed and help them be better prepared for security hacks. The concepts of cyber-attacks and the social aspects behind all types of attacks for individual gain has been discussed in class and relates to this article. The concept of determinism also relates to this article as it is the foundation of questions what causes individuals to choose to engage in certain behaviors this in this case Keberoasting. Why do individuals choose to engage in this behavior and pick this type of attack? Keberoasting is one of the most common attacks against domain controllers which makes it very important for people to be aware of this attack technique and how to protect themselves from it.