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eXfiltration Advanced Persistent Threats (XAPTs) increasingly account for incidents concerned with critical information exfiltration from High Valued Targets (HVTs). Existing Cyber Defence frameworks and data fusion models cannot cope with XAPTs due to a lack of provision for multi-phase attacks characterized by uncertainty and conflicting information. The Markov Multi-phase Transferable Belief Model (MM-TBM) extends the Transferable Belief Model to address the multi-phase nature of cyber-attacks and to obtain previously indeterminable Cyber SA. As a data fusion technique, MM-TBM constitutes a novel approach for performing hypothesis assessment and evidence combination across phases, by means of a new combination rule, called the Multi-phase Combination Rule with conflict Reset (MCR 2). The impact of MM-TBM as a Cyber Situational Awareness capability and its implications as a multi-phase data fusion theory have been empirically validated through a series of scenario-based Cyber SA experiments for detecting, tracking, and predicting XAPTs.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the credibility of internet shopping. Credibility, which refers to the believability of information, is an important consideration of internet shopping.Design/methodology/approachThe evaluation is conducted by incorporating Fogg's 10 Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility into Nielsen's heuristic evaluation. Furthermore, security and individualisation are considered as additional heuristics. Evaluation criteria are developed based on these 12 heuristics. Three UK car insurance web sites are selected for evaluation, including the AA, Norwich Union and Tesco.FindingsThe results show that the Norwich Union site seems to be the most credible while the Tesco site appears to be the least credible. The most significant credibility problems are found to lie in the areas of “trustworthiness”, “expertise” and “real‐world feel”. In other words, these three areas are key issues for future improvement of these sites.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature by providing a set of credibility design guidelines, which can be used to support the improved development of future internet shopping designs, especially car insurance web sites.

Purpose -Cognitive style has been identified to be significantly influential in deciding users' preferences of search engines. In particular, Witkin's field dependence/independence has been widely studied in the area of web searching. It has been suggested that this cognitive style has conceptual links with the holism/serialism. This study aims to investigate the differences between the field dependence/independence and holism/serialism. Design/methodology/approach -An empirical study was conducted with 120 students from a UK university. Riding's cognitive style analysis (CSA) and Ford's study preference questionnaire (SPQ) were used to identify the students' cognitive styles. A questionnaire was designed to identify users' preferences for the design of search engines. Data mining techniques were applied to analyse the data obtained from the empirical study. Findings -The results highlight three findings. First, a fundamental link is confirmed between the two cognitive styles. Second, the relationship between field dependent users and holists is suggested to be more prominent than that of field independent users and serialists. Third, the interface design preferences of field dependent and field independent users can be split more clearly than those of holists and serialists. Originality/value -The contributions of this study include a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between field dependence/independence and holists/serialists as well as proposing a novel methodology for data analyses.