Mobile security technologies and intelligence agency implementation

Mobile Security vs. intelligence agencies

While the word \'terrorism\' has several definitions, the following has been quite commonly encountered: Terrorism represents an imperiling, menacing and illegal exertion of violence/force by individuals or organized entities against property or fellow human beings to coerce and intimidate governments and communities, usually to serve political or twisted ideological ends. According to Symantec\'s Richard Ford and Sarah Gordon, cyber-terrorism is a crime wherein IT-human terror motivations interact in a virtual digital space. Clearly, terror operations have been increasing in sophistication over the years. Mobile terrorism has proven to be a grave menace to rapid technological evolution. Key national infrastructural and defense systems are often targeted. Future terror outfits will win their battles without using actual weaponry; they need only destroy the infrastructure that is heavily reliant on IT systems. Rapid web-user growth and reliance on the Internet has drastically intensified security risks. These may only be curbed by proper preventive security measures. For grasping the concept of terrorism and mobile security, reviewing its background for how terrorists or terror outfits exploit state-of-the-art technology and the types of measures adopted by international agencies and governments for combating cyber-terrorism is vital (Bogdanoski & Petreski, 2013).

Information Collection using Mobile Technology

In this digital era, mobile technology has witnessed increasing use as an instrument to gather and disseminate information. Several agencies such Homeland Security, the nation\'s defense department, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies are employing mobile technology to manage information. Android™, Windows Mobile™ and iPhone®/iPad® are the three key mobile devices used today to gather and disseminate information. These tools\' open architecture facilitates swift development and dissemination of applications. In spite of the current age\'s cutting-edge mobile technology, usage, security, trends, and other factors need to be taken into account when shifting to mobile-based data acquisition and distribution designs (Hosmer, Jeffcoat, Davis, & McGibbon, 2016).

Technology behind Mobile Security

iOS devices are developed using the iOS software development kit and X-code tools. The latter is linked closely to Cocoa Touch structures that guide iOS user interactions. Cocoa Touch is responsible for offering developer access to accelerometers, GPS sensors, cameras, and other device hardware. This hardware access will herald advances in data acquisition and distribution apps in the future. Similar to Apple\'s offerings (i.e., iPad® and iPhone®), Android™ mobile devices provide a downloadable software development kit free of cost from their site as well. Android\'s most recent software development kit affords developer accessibility of hardware elements such as GPS sensors, Bluetooth, accelerometers, near-field communication hardware, displays, speech recognition, etc. In contrast to Apple\'s developers who first test and approve apps prior to publishing them to its application store, the developers of Android™ can publish app to its market by merely registering themselves as Android™ app developers. Consequently, Android\'sapp Market is seeing a larger and swifter addition of apps compared to Apple\'s store. The mobile-non-mobile line is fuzzy. A majority of best practices have been targeted at upper-end to middle-range devices supporting XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language), Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript capabilities (Hosmer, Jeffcoat, Davis, & McGibbon, 2016).

Security Threats in Mobile Agent System

The arrival of mobile agent technologies presents major never-before-seen security challenges. The agent, at the time of visiting, engages in an interaction with the remaining agents capable of studying or modifying its content. Furthermore, the visited host (i.e., the computer the agents visit and operate on) can manipulate or even go as far as obliterating the agent. Scholars group attacks into active and passive attacks (Zrari, Hachicha, & Ghedira, 2015). Literature identifies the following 5 groups of risk, namely:

1. Attacks that occur between two mobile agents: This category spreads attacks suffered by one agent at the hands of another agent. Risks are essentially of 4 kinds: Attacks against privacy, authentication, non-repudiation and availability.

1. Host attacks for agents: In order to run any agent, hosts need access to the agent\'s data, state and code. Therefore, agents operating on any site will be vulnerable to security risks including attacks against privacy, integrity, authentication, and availability.

1. Attack of agent on host: Here, the specific issues encountered include repudiation, masquerading, service denial and unauthorized access.

1. Security between external bodies and the agent: For migrating to other sites, agents need to navigate communications networks on which it is possible the agent experiences diverse attacks including destruction, listening, and content change.

1. An agent may face attacks from other agents or platform users.

Security Threats and Counter Measures

A radically changing computing model has been offered by mobile agent technologies, wherein programs such as software agents are able to stop when running on hosts, get transferred to some other agent-enabled network host, and continue to run on this novel host. After all, mobile codes were employed by remote job entry (RJE) systems. The present-day mobile agents may be categorized in several ways, from straightforward disseminated objects to intelligent, well-organized software. Owing to this swift mobile agent evolution, numerous critical security challenges have been raised and many efforts are being devoted to tackle these challenges, aiming at providing easily-deployable, extensively-executable, reliable mobile agent structures (Amro, 2014). Authentication, availability, non-repudiation, confidentiality, and answerability are the key requirements to secure these systems.

1. Authorization and Authentication: This represents a procedure to confirm an entity\'s identity. Within systems of mobile agents, the authentication process necessitates platform as well as agent authentication by one another. In other words, the agent needs to be familiar with its environment of execution and vice versa.

1. Privacy, Confidentiality, and Anonymity: The term \'confidentiality\' is used to denote a state of concealing private, secret information from disclosure to unauthorized entities. Disclosing this information can damage privacy levels, as data might contain sensitive agent-related information.

1. Non-repudiation and Accountability: Repudiation issues surface when any entity declares non-involvement in a communication or activity it did actually participate in. For overcoming this issue, key security and communications linked activities ought to be documented securely to serve the purpose of tracing, auditing and non-repudiation.

1. Availability: Mobile agent platforms ought to guarantee service and information obtainability for inbound and local mobile agents. In other words, the platform ought to offer concurrent access, controlled concurrency, exclusive access and deadlock management when needed.

Mobile Phone and Terror Leadership

The second salient aspect of effective technological development and execution is terror outfit organization and leadership. Tech-savvy terrorist leaders, often those having technical qualifications (for instance, bin Laden, founder of the al-Qaeda terror outfit, who had a civil engineering degree), constantly seek novel inventions and technologies, and goad their organizations into developing and implementing them. A comparative benefit enjoyed by al-Qaeda has been the business-modeled form of organization it adopted, instead of a solely military model. This model integrated cell (small terrorist units) autonomy and flexibility, in addition to professional membership management systems, evidenced by their organization and pay structure. Ricardo Faria (2014) claims they were facing tough financial times. Members\' pay was reduced by half by Dr. Zawahri, who objected and argued with them over expenses incurred. For instance, the Yemeni unit was reproached for purchasing a fax machine without permission, asked for an explanation regarding its cellphone invoice and commanded to cease expenditures unless absolutely essential.

Effective recruitment, organizational longevity and size prove to be key factors which determine effective technology implementation. A group which can boast of membership from technically educated clusters of the population will more likely demonstrate technological success. Similarly, size of organization is significant as, with growth in organization size, division of labor is more efficient and members can specialize in diverse areas like technical acquisition, innovation and creation. Finally, longevity proves vital to technological success since the processes of technology development or implementation are time-consuming ones (Ricardo Faria, 2014).

Mobile Usage to Identify Terrorist Behavior

User data proliferation results from the modern technological explosion. Verizon Wireless boasts a 94-million-strong wireless subscriber base while AT&T boasts of over a hundred million. Individual subscriber-related information (e.g., text messaging use, data plans, communication patterns, location and movement) is documented regularly. Likewise, information concerning unrelated occurrences like credit/debit card transactions, electricity consumption, web searches, traffic jams, and mammograms is accumulated by commercial service providers and offers a plethora of individual details like public health problems, general geographic and economic trends, social relations, etc. Social scientific experts have embraced this and discovered novel data mining techniques and technique to analyze sources for novel human behavioral patterns. A deeply-mourned post-twin tower attacks surveillance initiative, TIA (Total Information Awareness), openly demanded for extremely extensive databases that encompassed detailed information regarding every likely terror threat. TLS innovation aimed at employing private enterprise data and governmental databases for developing a more comprehensive surveillance target image and employing link analysis instruments for creating suspect portraits (Bloch-Wehba, 2013).

A National Security Agency initiative - \"Genoa,\" subsequently renamed \"Topsail\" -- attempted at devising decision-supports for policy and intelligence analyst units for facilitating anticipation and pre-empting of terror threats to American interests. \"Databases,\" to them, were a novel type of very huge, virtually-consolidated, omni-medium, semantics-loaded storehouse of information not limited by current narrow commercial database offerings. Innovative technologies were pursued to treat such databases as one grand, consolidated, virtual database. In this instance, data mining doesn\'t represent the sole technology used. Network surveillance, pattern matching, link analysis, and other instruments are also taking hold. But the power balance will be perpetually disproportionate till governments seek facts held by private industries, particularly given the rationale of counterterrorism. The Treasury Department-operated Terrorist Finance Tracking Program represents just one in a number of financial surveillance instruments that may be availed of. In fact, in the post-initiative release oversight hearing, numerous Congressmen voiced the problem that terror financing largely occurred via ahawala, instead of Western banking, system (Bloch-Wehba, 2013).

Visualizing Criminal Networks

Awareness of crime network structures and organization proves crucial to combating terrorism and racketeering, both in investigating and in developing effective plans for preventing and curbing crime. Intelligence agents take advantage of information derived out of analyses of extensive heterogeneous data deriving pools from numerous informative sources. These include surveillance information, phone traffic records, interview information, law enforcement intelligence records, social networks, and experiential police information that help seek information regarding crime networks and facilitate the initiation of suitable, destabilizing action. Here, visual representation methods coordinate network structure examinations along with social network analyses metrics. Still, visualization instruments\' usefulness might reduce if system complexity and dimensions transcend particular terms. Ferrara E., Catanese, Fiumara, and De Meo (2014) utilize interactive visualization methods for representing terror and crime networks reconstructed out of phone traffic information, namely fisheye, geo-mapping and foci network arrangements. These techniques enable network investigation using animated transitions between local enlargement methods and visualization models for improving insights into interesting areas. A combination of multiple visualization models\' components permits significant enhancements relating to traditional visualization models, typically incomprehensible in the event of high network complexity.

Studying Organized Terror Networks

Cyber-attacks pose a grave threat to the nation in terms of being an open declaration of war and owing to their ability to paralyze industrial control systems. Hence, there is a need for ESMs (enterprise security management systems) for integrated network system management, encompassing firewall, virtual private network, Internet Provider Security, etc. But existing ESM is associated with one limitation: only external cyber-attacks are blocked because of the use of a network attack detection technique which supervises traffic inflows (outside-inside flow) (Jeon, Park, Chun, & Kim, 2016).

The expert network analysis system known as log analysis is designed to examine criminal networks. This system reconstructs crime networks beginning with records of phone calls. It assists detectives in uncovering and identifying crime outfits\' structure. It also explains crime community structures. The platform enables statistical network examination, cellphone network information\'s visual analysis, and community detection. It facilitates forensic investigators\' understanding of crime outfit hierarchies and identifying members who offer sub-group connections and have an influential role. Hence, this computational framework may be applicable in actual criminal investigations (Ferrara E., De Meo, Catanese, & Fiumara, 2014).

Hunting down Terror Suspects

Topinka\'s (2016) paper explores the circulation of an image by Boston Marathon participant, David Green, on the Internet, of the Boston Marathon terror attacks\' immediate aftermath. This picture incidentally pinpoints Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fleeing the attack scene. At first, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and internet message boards failed to notice him; he was one of thousands of innocent faces in the crowd of runners. But after identifying him as the second suspect, the photo took on a new meaning. Tsarnaev became a figure inspiring terror, a personification of the bombing, and a specter whose presence in a historical archive will haunt future generations of humanity. Topinka studies how this phantom\'s appearance concurrently reveals terrorists\' attacks on daily mediations and their response to terrorist manifestations. He asserts that photography supports vernacular practices, successively supporting urban governmentality practices and comprehending these necessitates paying attention to urban visual mediation records wherein the links between illusion and reality, the past and the present, and spectacle and surveillance invariably remain open to and dependent on amendment.

Handling the Future with Intensive Data Analysis

Models devised for countering al-Qaeda may effectively function as examples for future intelligence-headed struggles against enemies, including cartels, mobile security perpetrators and human traffickers. However, for all issues presented by these novel intelligence instruments and strategies, the American Intelligence Community has been faced with novel, yet-to-be-resolved questions regarding American intelligence operations\' magnitude and nature. Analytic counterterrorism-focused strategies also drive public debate regarding intelligence\'s role within democratic nations. Data acquisition magnitude, within an era wherein people across the globe are divulging increasing amounts of private information freely on social network, has raised the issue of how privacy will be refined in a digital era. Contrary to the argument regarding physical privacy (airport searches are anticipated but searches when shopping for grocery aren\'t and would be resisted), arguments regarding data/mobile privacy are yet to attain the stage in which boundaries are outlined by culture. CCTV cameras on public roads are expected and accepted as intelligence sources, but not personal Facebook information. Such debates will continue to rage. Intelligence bodies aiming at identifying novel threat networks have to bank on whatever information they can get their hands on as the swiftest means to map individual linkages (Mudd, 2014).

Analytical Study on Terrorism

After 9/11, there was a flood of analytical terrorism-related researches. Depending on policy applicability, five major areas of strong research interests are identified, including terror attack trend examination, terrorism\'s economic repercussions, counterterrorism efficacy, the link between liberal democracies and terrorism, and terrorism\'s causes. The overall indirect and direct expenses of the 9/11 hijackings were estimated at 80-90 billion dollars when America\'s GDP (gross domestic product) was roughly ten trillion dollars. Even extensive attacks cause small losses in terms of GDP percentage. For instance, the 2004 Madrid train bombings cost roughly 335.1 million dollars (approximately 0.03% of the nation\'s GDP). Despite sectors susceptible to terrorism potentially sustaining significant economic losses, the losses will be small in relation to the overall economy, as the foreign direct investment or tourism sectors are often small in relation to the overall GDP.