Abstract
Currently, there are several security-related standards and recommendations concerning Domain Name System (DNS) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) services, that are highly valuable for governments and their services, and other public or private organizations. This is also the case of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). However, since these institutions have administrative autonomy, they present different statuses and paces in the adoption of these web-related security services. This paper presents an overview regarding the implementation of security standards and recommendations by the Portuguese HEIs. In order to collect these results, a set of scripts were developed and executed. Data were collected concerning the security of the DNS and HTTP protocols, namely, the support of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), HTTP main configurations and redirection, digital certificates, key size, algorithms and Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions used. The results obtained allow to conclude that there are different progresses between HEIs. In particular, only 11.7% of HEIs support DNSSEC, 14.4% do not use any SSL certificates, 74.8% use a 2048 bits encryption key, and 81.1% use the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm. Also, 6.3% of HEIs still negotiate with the vulnerable SSLv3 version. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

Abstract
This research aims to represent a novel approach to detect malicious nodes in Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) within the next-generation smart cities. Smart city applications have a critical role in improving public services quality, and security is their main weakness. Hence, a systematic multidimensional approach is required for data storage and security. Routing attacks, especially sinkholes, can direct the network data to an attacker and can also disrupt the network equipment. Communications need to be with integrity, confidentiality, and authentication. So, the smart city and urban Internet of Things (IoT) network, must be secure, and the data exchanged across the network must be encrypted. To solve these challenges, a new protocol using CLustering Multi-Layer Security Protocol (CL-MLSP) with AODV has been proposed. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm is aligned with the proposed protocol for encryption and decryption. The shortest path is obtained by the clustering method based on energy, mobility, and distribution for each node. Ns2 is used to evaluate the CL-MLSP performance, and the parameters are network lifetime, latency, packet loss, and security. We have compared CL-MLPS with ECP-AODV, Probe, and Multi-Path. The proposed method superiority rates in energy consumption, drop rate, delay, throughput, and security performance are 6.54%, 12.87%, 8.12%, 9.46%, respectively.

Abstract
Social engineering attacks such as phishing are performed against companies and institutions and thus, cybersecurity awareness and training of technical and non-technical human resources play a fundamental role in preventing and mitigating a set of cyberattacks. This paper presents a comparative study based on simulated phishing attacks on two organizations with contrasting security practices and procedures. The first organization is a secondary school, with no IT staff, no defined information security policy, no guidance from top management on cybersecurity issues, and no training actions. The other is a company with a permanent IT staff, a defined security policy, and where its employees receive regular cybersecurity awareness training exercises. Two simulated phishing attack scenarios were deployed to compare these organisations regarding the behaviour of their employees and the readiness of their IT staff and to verify if the employees’ academic degree is a decisive criterion to protect them against this type of attack. The main results show that the rapid reporting and action of the IT staff in the organization where it existed, was an effective measure to mitigate the impact of the simulated phishing attack. In addition, the results show that about 18% of school employees leaked their data, compared to about 10% of the company. Furthermore, this study allows us to deduce that the academic level of employees does not seem to be a decisive criterion to protect them against phishing attacks. © 2022, Innovative Information Science and Technology Research Group. All rights reserved.

Abstract
Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are used worldwide in several Internet of Things (IoT) applications that rely on large-scale deployments. Despite most of these networks include their own security mechanisms with built-in encryption, they are still vulnerable to a range of attacks that can be performed using low-cost Software Defined Radio (SDR) hardware and low-complexity techniques. This work provides an experimental setup implemented to exploit physical layer vulnerabilities with SDR techniques. Several attack vectors typically related to LPWAN within the IoT ecosystem are implemented and tested such as Global Positioning (GPS) Spoofing, Replay Attacks, Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Jamming, in environments that rely specifically on LoRaWAN networks. The results show that, in LoRAWAN networks, a set of vulnerabilities can be exploited leading to the incorrect functioning of the executed applications, and possible damage to the systems in which they operate. It was possible to verify that, depending on the type of activation method used between the devices and the LoRaWAN server, the communications and the devices can be compromised.

Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a set of low-cost wireless sensors that can collect, process and send environment's data. WSN nodes are battery powered, therefore energy management is a key factor for long live network. One way to prolong lifetime of network is to utilize routing protocols to manage energy consumption. To have an energy efficient protocol in environment interactions, we can apply ZigBee protocols. Among these Artificial Intelligence Interactions routing methods, Tree Routing (TR) that acts in the tree network topology is considered a simple routing protocol with low overhead for ZigBee. In a tree topology, every nodes can be recognized as a parent or child of another node and in this regard, there is no circling. The most important problem of TR is increasing the number of steps to get data to the destination. To solve this problem several algorithms were proposed that its focus is on fewer steps. In this research we present an artificial Intelligence Tree Routing based on RNN and ZigBee protocol in IoT environment. Simulation results show that NEWTR improve the network lifetime by 5.549% and decreases the energy consumption (EC) of the network by 5.817% as compared with AODV routing protocol.

Abstract
Today, cloud platforms for Internet of Everything (IoE) are facilitating organizational and industrial growth, and have different requirements based on their different purposes. Usual task scheduling algorithms for distributed environments such as group of clusters, networks, and clouds, focus only on the shortest execution time, regardless of the power consumption. Network energy can be optimized if tasks are properly scheduled to be implemented in virtual machines, thus achieving green computing. In this research, Dynamic Voltage Frequency Dcaling (DVFS) is used in two different ways, to select a suitable candidate for scheduling the tasks with the help of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach. First, the GIoTDVFS_SFB method based on sorting processor elements in Cloud has been considered to handle Task Scheduling problem in the Clouds system. Alternatively, the GIoTDVFS_mGA microgenetic method has been used to select suitable candidates. The proposed mGA and SFB methods are compared with SLAbased suggested for Cloud environments, and it is shown that the Makespan and Gain in benchmarks 512 and 1024 are optimized in the proposed method. In addition, the Energy Consumption (EC) of Real PM (RPMs) against the numeral of Tasks has been considered with that of PAFogIoTDVFS and EnergyAwareDVFS methods in this area. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.