Special Issue on Attacks and Distinct Features in Networks

Emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) has enlarged the scope of the network even in daily life, and today many household items are being served or connected together. Due to such infiltration of networking, the need for security and secured communication has become increasingly important. Security simply means protection from any potential harm to valuable assets (data and/or information) or deterrence of malicious behavior. In contrast, secured communication implies two communicating entities should not be heard or modified by any third person. That type of communication means the encrypted shared information between two entities cannot be interpreted by anyone else as information is encoded by the sender that can be easily decoded by the intended receiver. If transmission is achieved in multi-hop fashion, the paths should not be traceable by unauthorized entities. Other than spoken face-to-face interaction, it can be generalized that no communication is guaranteed to be secure; despite trying to provide all technical support, the sheer volume of communication could limit the amount of surveillance. This Special Issue addresses some of these issues in wired communication. This Special Issue contains three articles dealing with different aspects of attacks. These outbreaks are possible by intruders and phishing attacks sending an email to the victim that appears to be from a legitimate organization. The idea is to obtain the victim’s credentials at some false webpage or install some spyware on the victim’s machine. This type of attack has become one of the most serious threats to all Internet users. Several approaches have been considered in the literature. The first article deals with a comprehensive solution to detect and filter the various types of phishing attacks. These attacks include email phishing that an attacker can easily perform by copying any legitimate website, whereas detection of phishing attacks is not as easy as it appears. Such an attack can be initiated when an attacker sends a spoofed email with embedded malicious links to a user to update their account information that appears to be legitimate. More attention is being paid to the use of phishing links on the Internet in sending promotional and monetary e-mails to attract the users. Strengths and associated weakness of different approaches have been considered and recent developments have been included. The scope of future research has also been outlined in this article. The growth of on-line social networks has been explosive, even though maintaining privacy is becoming important both in Industry and Academia. Most of the existing works on the privacypreserved online social networks are based on static graphs. Users’ social interests are used to form “channel subscriptions”. Exploring a social actor’s subscribed channel sizes and the frequency of joining/leaving the channels can be used to indicate multiple relations among social actors that represent evolving social subscription networks (ESSN) as a hypergraph. But, due to the unique structure, ESSN is vulnerable to both spatial and temporal attacks. The way sparse data is partitioned into several anonymous groups does affect its utility. An adversary may still be able to identify some nodes even if they may have the same node rank sequence. Nodes subscribing to different channels could lead to inappropriate grouping. To avoid this, the second article first compresses and coarsely partitions the data space and then employs a new concept of equivalent channels that helps in anonymization of ESSN. For protecting privacy, K-anonymization needs to be confirmed for the whole network such that the members of each group are indistinguishable. The second article entitled, “Privacy-preserved