Modeling Deception: A Case Study of Email Phishing

Information manipulation for deception continues to evolve at a remarkable rate. Artificial intelligence has greatly reduced the burden of combing through documents for evidence of manipulation; but it has also enabled the development of clever modes of deception. In this study, we modeled deception attacks by examining phishing emails that successfully evaded detection by the Microsoft 365 filtering system. The sample population selected for this study was the University of North Texas students, faculty, staff, alumni and retirees who maintain their university email accounts. The model explains why certain individuals and organizations are selected as targets, and identifies potential counter measures and counter attacks. Over a one-year period, 432 phishing emails with different features, characters, length, context and semantics successfully passed through Microsoft Office 365 filtering system. The targeted population ranged from 18 years old up to those of retirement age; ranged across educational levels from undergraduate through doctoral levels; and ranged across races. The unstructured data was preprocessed by filtering out duplicates to avoid overemphasizing a single attack. The term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and distribution of words over documents (topic modeling) were analyzed. Results show that staff and students were the main target audience, and the phishing email volume spiked in the summer and holiday season. The TF-IDF analysis showed that the phishing emails could be categorized under six categories: reward, urgency, job, entertainment, fear, and curiosity. Analysis showed that attackers use information gap theory to bait email recipients to open phishing emails with no subject line or very attractive subject line in about thirty percent of cases. Ambiguity remains the main stimulus used by phishing attackers, while the reinforcements used to misinform the targets range from positive reinforcements (prize, reward) to negative reinforcements (blackmail, potential consequences).

Leveraging Digital Library Infrastructure to Build a Language Archive

Building a digital language archive requires a number of steps to ensure collecting, describing, preserving, and providing access to language data in effective and efficient ways. The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) group has partnered with the University of North Texas (UNT) Digital Library to build a series of interconnected digital collections that leverage existing UNT technical and metadata infrastructure to provide access to data from and for various language communities. This article introduces the reader to the background of this project and discusses some of the important for representing language materials areas where UNT metadata has needed flexibility to better fit the needs of intended audiences. These areas include a workflow for standardized language representation (the Language field), defining roles for persons related to the item (Creator and Contributor fields), and representing interconnections between related items (the Relation field). Although further work is needed to improve language data representation in the CoRSAL digital language archive, we believe the model adopted by our team and lessons learned could benefit others in the language archiving community.

Book Reviews

A History of the Small Arms Made by the Sterling Armament Company: Excellence in Adversity Reviewed by: Jack Shanley Peter Laidler, James Edmiston & David Howroyd. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2020. ISBN 978-15-26773-30-2. xv + 352 pp., 32 col. illus., 350 b. & w. illus. £40. Winchester Model 1895: Last of the Classic Lever Actions Reviewed by: Danny Michael Rob Kassab & Brad Dunbar. Boca Raton: Buffalo Cove Publishing, 2019. ISBN 978-0-578-46655-2. 432 pp., numerous col. illus. $89.99. Firearms of the Texas Rangers: From the Frontier Era to the Modern Age Reviewed by: Patrick Senft Doug Dukes. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-574-41810-1. 640 pp., 182 b. & w. illus. $45.

Contested Spaces, Shared Concerns

Roadways are sociocultural spaces constructed for human travel which embody intersections of technology, transportation, and culture. In order to navigate these spaces successfully, autonomous vehicles must be able to respond to the needs and practices of those who use the road. We conducted research on how cyclists, solid waste truck drivers, and crossing guards experience the driving behaviors of other road users, to inform the development of autonomous vehicles. We found that the roadways were contested spaces, with each road user group enacting their own social constructions of the road. Furthermore, the three groups we worked with all felt marginalized by comparison with car drivers, who were ideologically and often physically dominant on the road. This article is based on research for the Nissan Research Center - Silicon Valley, which took place as part of a Design Anthropology course at the University of North Texas.

A Collaborative Approach to Newspaper Preservation

This column explores a collaborative undertaking between the Denton Public Library in Denton, Texas, and the University of North Texas Libraries (UNT) to build digital access to the city of Denton’s newspaper of record, the Denton Record-Chronicle (DRC). The process included coordination with the newspaper publisher, solidifying agreements between the libraries, obtaining grant funding for the project, and ensuring scheduled uploads to build digital access to the DRC via The Portal to Texas History’s Texas Digital Newspaper Program (TDNP). TDNP builds open access to Texas newspapers, and the partnership between the Denton Public Library and UNT exemplifies the value of collaboration to preserving history and building digital access to research materials

Sc3N@C80 and La@C82 doped graphene for a new class of optoelectronic devices

Hybrid graphene photodetectors (PDs) with endohedral Sc3N@C80 and La@C82 were used by the Kaul Research Group at the University of North Texas to dope graphene p-type and n-type, respectively, that resulted in significant optoelectronic property enhancement of the PDs.