© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.An increase number of cyberattacks on public and private organizations have been performed by exploiting their social and technological vulnerabilities. Mainly, these attacks aim to obtain illegal profits by extorting organizations, affecting their reputation and normal operation. In order to minimize the impact of these attacks, it is essential that these organizations not only implement preventive actions and efficient security mechanisms, but also continually evaluate the security risks their staff are exposed to when performing their job tasks. This paper presents a case study to assess the private and public Portuguese organizations security related practices followed by their staff. The results obtained by a conducted survey allow the analysis of behaviours and practices followed by the staff of these organizations and also allow to draw conclusions about their security procedures and risk awareness.

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are used to prevent attacks by detecting potential harmful intrusion attempts. Currently, there are a set of available Open Source IDS with different characteristics. The Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (OSSEC) supports multiple features and its implementation consists of Agents that collect and send event logs to a Manager that analyzes and tests them against specific rules. In the Manager, if certain events match a specific rule, predefined actions are triggered in the Agents such as to block or unblock a particular IP address. However, once an action is triggered, the systems administrator is not able to centrally check and obtain detailed information of the past event logs. In addition, OSSEC may assume false positive or negative detections and their triggered actions: previously harmless but blocked IP addresses by OSSEC have to be unblocked in order to reestablish normal operation or potential harmful IP addresses not previously blocked by OSSEC should be blocked in order to increase protection levels. These operations to override OSSEC actions must be manually performed in every Agent, thus requiring time and human resources. Both these limitations have a higher impact on large scale OSSEC deployments assuming tens or hundreds of Agents. This paper proposes an extension to OSSEC that improves the administrator analysis capability by maintaining, organizing and presenting Agent logs in a central point, and it allows for blocking or unblocking IP addresses in order to override actions triggered by false detections. The proposed extension aims to increase efficiency of time and human resources management, mainly considering large scale OSSEC deployments.

© 2018 IEEE.The security standard ISO/IEC 27001 provides orientations to support organizations to set adequate best practices in information security management, specifying requirements that enable the appropriate selection and implementation of security controls. This standard assists organizations to protect their information assets, achieve their adequate levels of security and thus help them to succeed their business goals. Currently, an increasing number of Portuguese organizations seek to comply ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standard and obtain the respective certification. This paper presents the result of a research conducted in order to detail the main difficulties and limitations evidenced by Portuguese organizations while meeting the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standard. Moreover, this paper provides discussion on the results obtained, to better understand the progress and status quo of this standard implementation. From the research conducted it can be seen that organizations are becoming heavily concerned with information security issues, mainly due it to the recent cybersecurity incidents occurred. Additionally, certification is recognized as an important instrument to give confidence and demonstrate to all organizational' customers, suppliers and stakeholders that information security components are verified and organized within the organization.

Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved Security attacks using USB interfaces and devices are becoming more advanced, which boost efforts to develop counter measures in order to protect systems and data. One of the most recent attacks using USB devices is the BadUSB attack, performed by spoofing the device’s firmware and allowing the attackers to execute a set of malicious actions, e.g. an USB storage device could be mounted as USB keyboard in order to inject malicious scripts into the system. This paper proposes a protection agent against BadUSB attack developed for Windows operative systems. It allows a user to check the class of an USB device ready to be mounted, though enabling the detection of a potential attack if the expected functionality of the device does not match with its class type. The results show that the proposed protection agent is capable of detecting potential intrusions by blocking the installation of the device, scanning the device for something that identifies it, searching for a description locally and finally warning the user about the device meaning that all devices must be approved by the user when plugged in if the system protection agent is running.

© 2015 IEEE.Real-time monitoring applications may be used in a wireless sensor network (WSN) and may generate packet flows with strict quality of service requirements in terms of delay, jitter, or packet loss. When strict delays are imposed from source to destination, the packets must be delivered at the destination within an end-to-end delay (EED) hard limit in order to be considered useful. Since the WSN nodes are scarce both in processing and energy resources, it is desirable that they only transport useful data, as this contributes to enhance the overall network performance and to improve energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer admission control (CLAC) mechanism to enhance the network performance and increase energy efficiency of a WSN, by avoiding the transmission of potentially useless packets. The CLAC mechanism uses an estimation technique to preview packets EED, and decides to forward a packet only if it is expected to meet the EED deadline defined by the application, dropping it otherwise. The results obtained show that CLAC enhances the network performance by increasing the useful packet delivery ratio in high network loads and improves the energy efficiency in every network load.