The Tech4Humanity Lab blog is comprised of research and general interests posts from lab students and faculty.
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Visualizing Ransomware Data Available in Open Source Repositories
Ransomware poses a persistent threat in the cyber landscape. Over the past four years, there have been more than 19,000 recorded ransomware attacks and leaks, with the number of victims increasing daily. The massive number of attacks in such a short timespan highlights the importance of understanding the tactics employed by ransomware groups.
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Ransomware and its Effect on Educational Institutions
Haleigh Horan and Divine Tsasa Nzita Ransomware attacks have become more common over the past several years and there has been a prominent spike in ransomware attacks against the education sector. As schools and school districts increase their use of technology across their enterprise operations they are increasingly viewed as potential targets with critical…
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VULNERABILITIES IN BLUETOOTH LOW ENERGY AND HOW THEY CAN BE LEVERAGED TO CAUSE HARM
By Christian Calvo Abstract Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless communication protocol designed for use in a variety of commercial devices. Devices that utilize BLE often have inferior security systems compared to alternative wireless devices, enabling malicious parties to more effectively execute adversarial attacks. To iterate the impact of adversarial attacks on BLE…
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The Role of Honey Pots in Cyber Defense: An Introduction
Deception technology in the cybersecurity and ransomware space has long been regarded as a method of threat actor data collection with strong potential. Some of this technology includes Honeypots, Honeyfiles, and Honeynets – faux systems, files, and networks meant to mimic an organization’s digital resources to further understand new attack vectors and threat actor…
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Regulating Custom Biomedical Devices: Challenges and Opportunities
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a United States agency responsible for regulating medical devices among other functions. The regulation process entails a lengthy pre-market process that looks at pre-clinical trials, clinical trials, the warehouse in which the device is manufactured, ethics behind the device, and more. When it comes to the device…
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AI’s Wetware Problem
When Project Mayhem won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2014, the project lead from Carnegie Mellon, Dr. David Brumley, writing on his team’s success, quoted DARPA program director Mike Walker saying the program was just the ““beginning of a revolution” in software security.” What could be better than an AI white hat hacker finding…
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LLMs – DeepSeek and Censorship.
The tech world has been rocked by the revelations of a more efficient and less expensive LLM created by the Chinese company DeepSeek. The revelations of the new model led to a single day $1 trillion loss on the U.S. Nasdaq 100. DeepSeek avoided U.S. microchip sanctions by training on the lower tier Nvidea…
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Examining Pakistani Digital Surveillance and Privacy Rights
Pakistan presents a critical case study in digital surveillance and privacy rights within emerging democracies. An evolving framework of digital surveillance and censorship laws in Pakistan increasingly constrain personal rights to privacy and freedom of speech. Pakistan’s unique placement as a post-colonial emerging democracy offers a study of how emerging democracies adapt to the…