Browsing by Author "Meyer, Heloise"

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    Friend or Foe – The impact of ChatGPT on capture the flag competitions
    (2024-03) Meyer, Heloise
    ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot, has taken the world by storm since the technology's release to the public in November 2022. The first reactions were awe and amazement as ChatGPT presented the capability to instantly respond to various text-based questions following a conversational approach. However, it is ChatGPT's ability to complete more advanced tasks, such as supplying source code to programming-related questions or generating complete articles focusing on a specific topic, which has caused eyebrows to be raised. The capabilities offered by ChatGPT, fuelled by popularity and easy accessibility, have introduced several new challenges for the academic sector. One such challenge is the concept of AI-assisted cheating, where students utilise chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to answer specific questions or complete assignments. Although various research studies have explored the impact of ChatGPT on university education, few studies have discussed the influence of ChatGPT on Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions. CTF competitions offer a popular platform to promote cybersecurity education, allowing students to gain hands-on experience solving cybersecurity challenges in a fun but controlled environment. The typical style of CTF challenges usually follows a question-answer format, which offers students the ideal opportunity to enlist the assistance of ChatGPT. This paper investigates the ability of ChatGPT to assist and aid students in solving CTF challenges. The exploratory study involves past CTF challenges across various categories and the questioning of ChatGPT in an attempt to solve the challenges. The outcome of the study reveals that although ChatGPT can assist students with challenges during CTF competitions, the assistance that can be offered is minimal. Instead of producing answers to CTF challenges, ChatGPT can merely offer insight or guidance regarding the questions asked.
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    Mobile forensics: Beyond traditional sources of digital evidence
    (ECCWS, 2020-06) Meyer, Heloise
    Mobility is the future and people of the 21st century are continuously witnessing the fast-paced growth of mobile technology. The ever-increasing storage capacity of mobile devices allows for the capturing of the user activities in digital format. Traditionally, such digital data include contacts, text and instant messages, call history, electronic mail, web browsing history, documents and geographical data. These rich sources of digital data present on mobile devices become increasingly important when mobile devices are linked to civil or criminal digital investigations. However, these sheer quantities of traditional digital data available on mobile devices often cause other forms of noteworthy digital data to go unnoticed. This paper investigates and identifies other available sources of digital data present on mobile devices that can be of value to digital forensic investigations. The study focuses exclusively on the Android operating system and presents an extensive evaluation of Android¿s file system. Furthermore, the study aims to locate, extract and utilise non-traditional or contemporary sources of digital data, such as log files, usage statistics and event data, as potential digital evidence in civil or criminal digital investigations. The outcome of the study leads to the construction of the new Pre-Analysed Device Snapshot (PADS) model, which provides a summary of the current state of the mobile device at the time of acquiring the device.
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    Utilisation of a virtual honeynet to proactively secure the South African National Research and Education Network against cyberattacks
    (2024-07) Meyer, Heloise; Barbour, Graham D; McDonald, Andre M; Badenhorst, Danielle P; Gertenbach, Wian P
    South Africa is witnessing a significant increase in cyberattacks. Although such an increase in cyberattacks can be attributed to various factors, poor investment in cybersecurity technology and lack of awareness are causing South Africa to be a target of interest. While cyberattacks are targeting various sectors, it is the cyberattacks impacting critical infrastructure that are a growing concern. The South African National Research and Education Network (SA NREN) is a high-speed network dedicated to science, research, education and innovation traffic. With the growth of the SA NREN and the continuous increase in cyberattacks affecting South African institutions, proactive steps are required to secure and protect the SA NREN. This responsibility lies with the SA NREN Cybersecurity Incident Response Team (CSIRT), which was established in 2016 to offer protection against cyberattacks. While various proactive measures are currently in place to monitor the SA NREN, the CSIRT continues to explore alternative cost-effective solutions to secure the NREN. This paper investigates the benefits of utilising a novel low-interaction secure shell (SSH) honeynet, referred to as the Virtual Honeynet, to monitor and proactively secure the SA NREN. The Virtual Honeynet uses virtual containers to reduce resource requirements and improve performance. The investigation involved the experimental deployment of the Virtual Honeynet on the SA NREN over a twelve-day period and the evaluation of the captured data. The evaluation conducted focused on extracting behavioural and geographical intelligence from the raw data to guide the deployment of cyber measures to secure the SA NREN. The results presented in this paper confirm the value the Virtual Honeynet offers to the SA NREN as a technology to proactively secure the network.