In my second blog post for the week (because I procrastinate any and every assignment), I am going to write about the topic of cyber-security today. I stumbled upon an article that was talking about this exact topic. The article is titled “Computer hackers could be thwarted by new ‘deception consistency method”. This title stood out to me because it may be a way to stop computer hackers almost entirely, so I decided to give it a read. The article turned out to be very short and to the point which is admirable, but it does make it a little harder to write about.

The abstract of this article leads of with “Can you deceive a deceiver?” and I absolutely love that phrase because it is like a PG-13 version of another phrase that I won’t mention here for the sake of professionalism. Anyways, the article mentions that the study by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Guanhua Yan and PhD student Zhan Shu at Birmingham University. They want to figure out a way to more effectively against malicious hackers. It was inspired by a data breach of Target in 2013, which cost them around 18.5 million dollars. They explain the concept of cyber deception is and I find it to be an interesting concept. To put it simply, it is putting the hackers in a fake environment to make them think they are in the system, but in reality, they are in some fake system. They mention that the problem with deception currently is that there are “bad lies” that make it blatantly obvious to hackers that they are in a fake environment.

The two decided to develop a deception consistency method, which they then tested on college students who recently completed a cybersecurity course, and the results were very positive. Most of the students were unable to recognize that they were in a fake environment, and that most of them just guessed. While this is a step in the right direction, the is not a “cure-all for things like what happened to Target and Equifax.”. They did say that they would continue to improve the effectiveness of the method to stop the more advanced attacks.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article because I do want to learn more about cyber security in the future. I find it interesting that hackers can be mislead like this, and still think they are in a system. I don’t really have too much prior knowledge on cyber security, but this has definitely raised my interest about the subject. I don’t disagree with any of the information. These two researchers did an excellent job on this study, and I encourage you to take a look at this article.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.