Blockchain and Other Emerging Technologies for Digital Business Strategies

Over the past decade, digitalization has played a greater role in improving the business stature of small business by opening new venues, extending their reach, and thereby improving value producing opportunities. It also brought the small businesses additional responsibilities of having to deal with the security risks and threats which are ever-present on the digital platform. This chapter aims to review and analyse the cybersecurity risks in small businesses due to the adaption of new digital technologies. The chapter discusses the security risks and challenges dealt by small business, the key constraints in implementing a security program to comply with the legal and regulatory requirements, and how the cloud technology can answer many of those challenges.

Cyberattacks have become a nightmare for businesses, often having to spend time and resources identifying one or mitigating another. The current research is an effort to develop an artificial intelligence-based security solution that can meet the SME demands of providing a security solution capable of detecting cyberattacks in real-time before they eventually become a crisis for the business. The proposed solution uses multiple layers of deep neural networks using ReLu activation function and Adam algorithm as an optimizer to provide the detection capabilities. While Wireshark provides the model with powerful network monitoring capabilities, Weka fulfils the data pre-processing role to provide the AI module with a clean and structured dataset. The solution is tested for its ability to study the network patterns and capability to distinguish between the regular and malicious traffic. The proposed model is tested using two different datasets, a dataset created in a virtual lab environment, and an IoT-23 dataset. The performance of the proposed AI model is tested on the metrics of ‘accuracy’ and ‘loss’. The model performed well in distinguishing the network traffic on both the datasets. The model will provide the required augmentation capabilities for SMEs to better handle cyber threats.

Significant growth of the ageing population segment brings the necessity of additional healthcare investment. Besides somatic disorders, part of the older patient group suffers from Mild Cognitive Impairment and dementia. According to the World Health Organization, currently 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia only. The projection is 75 million in 2030 and 132 million by 2050 (WHO, 2021). Mild Cognitive Impairment is often the first stage of dementia. Most of the patients with MCI and dementia are home-based. Ambient Assisted Living can improve the wellbeing of patients and their relatives without considerably raising the price tag for healthcare. In the current work, the questionnaire was created for healthcare stakeholders in order to conceptualize potential AAL for MCI patients. In this paper, the role of a video observation in AAL is analyzed with help of non-parametric respondents’ group comparison.

Digital Transformation is a ubiquitous phrase that has become even more prolific in use following a recent world-wide pandemic that has forced many organisations to reconsider their processes, their business model, and their ways of working. However, whilst many organisations have embarked on a digital transformation, cyber resilience is not always considered, causing many transformations to lead to greater vulnerabilities and a higher exposure to cyber security breaches. The aim of this research is to develop a deeper understanding of the phrase ‘digital transformations’, who predominantly leads on them and if Cyber Resilience is a vital part of these transformation programmes. The research also considers whether the relationship between the C-Level and the IT Team has any bearing on whether Cyber Resilience is included in these transformation projects. The researcher has established that strong leadership was required to make certain that cyber resilience was included in digital transformation projects. In addition to this it must be seen and accepted that Cyber Resilience is an organizational issue for there to be a real impact. The relationship between the board and their view of Cyber Resilience was key to any sort of successful culture acceptance within their organisations. This acceptance also made a difference as to whether it was included in the business strategy. Even where the relationship between the board and the IT team was good, cyber resilience could be missed out. This was due to the lack of real understanding at board level. Therefore, cyber can never just be led by the IT function and should not be seen just as a technical issue.

Digital Twins, as a suite of technologies is progressively developing significant momentum in several fields of study. Various research works have been conducted outlining the concept, the underlying technologies, general and context-specific architectures, and applications. This study has been undertaken to identify relevant research areas, key authors, publishers, and geographical distribution of publications on digital twins through a systematic review and bibliometric analysis, to inform the trajectories of future research in the field. A keyword-based search for journals was first conducted in Web of Science Core Collection to obtain documents relevant for this study, and a systematic review was performed in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines. A bibliometric analysis was then performed on the extracted data using the VOSviewer software. The Tableau software and Microsoft Excel were also used to analyse and visualise some of insights derived from the analysis.

This chapter begins by briefly covering the history of Blockchain and introducing its core elements, continuing to explain the fundamentals of Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts. A discussion is made on nodes, consensus mechanisms, digital signatures and cryptographic hashes, types of blockchains, Ethereum, and Smart Contracts benefits. After that, it explores the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain as a subset of DLT in greater detail, discussing the benefits and challenges of DLT with Blockchain. It then presents us with some of the interesting use cases of Blockchain within various industries including financial, healthcare, manufacturing, and agriculture. Furthermore, it provides a roadmap for successfully implementing Blockchain in modern business, with recommendations on preparation, design and planning, implementation, and review. Finally, it explores future trends in DLT, blockchain and Smart Contracts.

MiTM attack aims to violate data in transmission through the air medium in a wireless network; MITM exploits compromise data confidentiality and integrity and are conceivably the most productive types of cyberattacks utilised today. The increasing use of personal devices like smartphones connecting to the internet via Wi-Fi has made wireless attacks on users more crucial. The cyber adversary becomes a “middleman” between two targets to intercept private communication, decrypt traffic, and exploit valuable information like bank details and credit cards. The new WPA3 protocol security features such as 256-bit encryption, OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption), Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE), and disallowing outdated legacy protocols provides risk mitigation against attacks. However, vulnerabilities in WPA3 have been reported whereby a device can be downgraded from WPA3 to WPA2, which opens the system up for DoS and MiTM attacks. This research investigates Wi-Fi-based exploits against the ecosystem of smartphones in the financial sector. Aircrack-ng and Ettercap are open-source tools accessible through the Kali Linux framework. These tools are utilised to demonstrate simulated DoS and MiTM attacks to explain the reported WPA3 vulnerabilities.

In the electronic era, the company environments are evolving into an insecure, composite, and indecisive atmosphere. This quick evolution can be blamed upon the rise of technology, competitive market, and legal and regulatory compliances. Teichert (Acta Univ Agriculturae Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis 67:1673–1687, [1]) observe this condition as the reason for forcing the business plans and policies of organizations to adapt to technological innovations. According to Gartner (no date), digital transformation could be termed as the evolution of technology as well as digital optimization including the discovery of advanced digital business models. Gartner also suggests labelling digital transformation as ‘digitization’ since nationalized establishments use the term digital transformation to mention normal IT practices like usage of online services. Vaughan [2] suggests the main four areas to consider while an organization plan on a digital transformation project as process transformation, business model transformation, domain transformation, cultural/organizational transformation. The benefit of a successful digital transformation according to the author is improved processes, fostering collaborations, broadening service options, and transforming the customer experience.

The exponential growth of Autonomous Intelligent Malware (AIM) has really changed the landscape in the cyber security fight against that attack of auto generated threats and how these threats needs to be dealt with. This research focuses on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML) and Deep learning (DL) to mitigate auto-generated cyber attacks which are hard to track and neutralise. Hence, the key issue that the research proposes to address is to evaluate the key challenges in using AI and ML as decision tools against autonomous cyber attacks, and the opportunities it presents. A proposal is posited on the future utilisation of Autonomous Cyber Defence (ACyD) as a tool to neutralise Autonomous intelligent Malware (AIM), embedded into Security Information and Events Management systems (SIEM). ACyD is principally a self-defending and self-healing cyber security system with the sole aim of persistently and autonomously defending all cyber physical systems against cyber attacks. The use of ACyD in cyber defence is a relatively new research area that the author hopes will gain grounds in the future.

The ubiquitous internet of things significantly improves every aspect of our daily lives. IoT devices and their use remain a big area of opportunity, but they are complicated by a lack of regulation as well as numerous security and privacy issues caused by design and setup flaws. Many current attacks against SMEs demonstrate that IoT devices make the networks vulnerable and expand the attack surface. Considering the widespread use of IoT devices and the security flaws they have, various parties have tried to provide security frameworks to teach users how to securely deploy these devices. They aimed to advocate that IoT devices should be subjected to strict security and privacy rules in isolated subnetworks, which has been proven to be a promising technique for securing networks, devices, and data. However, these frameworks are aimed at IT professionals rather than average users. In this study, we tried to educate normal users to securely deploy IoT devices. To achieve this goal, we have provided a set of best practices collected from existing standard frameworks. We have demonstrated the implementation of these security measures in two different scenarios using various network devices and with consideration of SME limitations. Some of the security measures are directly related to the device, and there is not much the consumer can do. However, if the technology is supported by the device, the users should be educated accordingly. To successfully achieve the aim of the study, we will investigate the existing vulnerabilities of smart devices and evaluate the existing guidelines for secure deployment of IoT devices. Then we will implement the current best practices for safeguarding computer networks, with a focus on IoT challenges and finally, we will pave the way to propose a practical framework for safely deploying IoT devices in small and medium enterprises.