Ransomware attacks against Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have catastrophic consequences not only to the targeted infrastructure, but also the services provided to the public. By encrypting the operational data, the ransomware attacks can disrupt the normal operations, which represents a serious problem for industrial systems. Ransomware employs several avoidance techniques, such as packing, obfuscation, noise insertion, irrelevant and redundant system call injection, to deceive the security measures and make both static and dynamic analysis more difficult. In this paper, a Weighted minimum Redundancy maximum Relevance (WmRmR) technique was proposed for better feature significance estimation in the data captured during the early stages of ransomware attacks. The technique combines an enhanced mRMR (EmRmR) with the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) so that it can filter out the runtime noisy behavior based on the weights calculated by the TF-IDF. The proposed technique has the capability to assess whether a feature in the relevant set is important or not. It has low-dimensional complexity and a smaller number of evaluations compared to the original mRmR method. The TF-IDF was used to evaluate the weights of the features generated by the EmRmR algorithm. Then, an inclusive entropy-based refinement method was used to decrease the size of the extracted data by identifying the system calls with strong behavioral indication. After extensive experimentation, the proposed technique has shown to be effective for ransomware early detection with low-complexity and few false-positive rates. To evaluate the proposed technique, we compared it with existing behavioral detection methods.

The use of Graph Routing in Wireless Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (WirelessHART) networks offers the benefit of increased reliability of communications because of path redundancy and multi-hop network paths. Nonetheless, Graph Routing in a WirelessHART network creates a hotspot challenge resulting from unbalanced energy consumption. This paper proposes the use of unequal clustering algorithms based on Graph Routing in WirelessHART networks to help with balancing energy consumption, maximizing reliability, and reducing the number of hops in the network. Graph Routing is compared with pre-set and probabilistic unequal clustering algorithms in terms of energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, throughput and average end-to-end delay. A simulation test reveals that Graph Routing has improved energy consumption, throughput and reduced average end-to-end delay when conducted using probabilistic unequal clustering algorithms. However, there is no significant change in the packet delivery ratio, as most packets reach their destination successfully anyway.

Due to the sharp increase in global industrial production, as well as the over-exploitation of land and sea resources, the quality of drinking water has deteriorated considerably. Furthermore, nowadays, many water supply systems serving growing human populations suffer from shortages since many rivers, lakes, and aquifers are drying up because of global climate change. To cope with these serious threats, smart water management systems are in great demand to ensure vigorous control of the quality and quantity of drinking water. Indeed, water monitoring is essential today since it allows to ensure the real-time control of water quality indicators and the appropriate management of resources in cities to provide an adequate water supply to citizens. In this context, a novel IoT-based framework is proposed to support smart water monitoring and management. The proposed framework, named SmartWater, combines cutting-edge technologies in the field of sensor clouds, deep learning, knowledge reasoning, and data processing and analytics. First, knowledge graphs are exploited to model the water network in a semantic and multi-relational manner. Then, incremental network embedding is performed to learn rich representations of water entities, in particular the affected water zones. Finally, a decision mechanism is defined to generate a water management plan depending on the water zones’ current states. A real-world dataset has been used in this study to experimentally validate the major features of the proposed smart water monitoring framework.

The emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has accelerated the adoption of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) for numerous applications. Effective communication in such applications requires reduced end-to-end transmission time, balanced energy consumption and increased communication reliability. Graph routing, the main routing method in IWSNs, has a significant impact on achieving effective communication in terms of satisfying these requirements. Graph routing algorithms involve applying the first-path available approach and using path redundancy to transmit data packets from a source sensor node to the gateway. However, this approach can affect end-to-end transmission time by creating conflicts among transmissions involving a common sensor node and promoting imbalanced energy consumption due to centralised management. The characteristics and requirements of these networks encounter further complications due to the need to find the best path on the basis of the requirements of IWSNs to overcome these challenges rather than using the available first-path. Such a requirement affects the network performance and prolongs the network lifetime. To address this problem, we adopt a Covariance-Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) to create and select the graph paths. Firstly, this article proposes three best single-objective graph routing paths according to the IWSN requirements that this research focused on. The sensor nodes select best paths based on three objective functions of CMA-ES: the best Path based on Distance (PODis), the best Path based on residual Energy (POEng) and the best Path based on End-to-End transmission time (POE2E). Secondly, to enhance energy consumption balance and achieve a balance among IWSN requirements, we adapt the CMA-ES to select the best path with multiple-objectives, otherwise known as the Best Path of Graph Routing with a CMA-ES (BPGR-ES). A simulation using MATALB with different configurations and parameters is applied to evaluate the enhanced graph routing algorithms. Furthermore, the performance of PODis, POEng, POE2E and BPGR-ES is compared with existing state-of-the-art graph routing algorithms. The simulation results reveal that the BPGR-ES algorithm achieved 87.53% more balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes in the network compared to other algorithms, and the delivery of data packets of BPGR-ES reached 99.86%, indicating more reliable communication.