The Research Process "Examining​ ​Ethical​ ​Issues​ with​ ​Malware​" - 1/8/18

Examining​ ​Ethical​ ​Issues​ with​ ​Malware​ ​and​ ​Designing​ ​a​ Browser-Based Phishing​ ​Identifier​ ​using​ Deep​ ​Learning

This is the finalized title of our project. It's a comprehensive amalgamation of my personal interests - tech - with new areas I'm unfamiliar with - humanities. This is part one of two posts, where I will address our research process.

The first step we took after finalizing our topic was to create a very rough outline of the paper. Here's our first idea:

[REDACTED]

Of course, this has changed a considerable amount. Right after creating it, our first steps were to start completing some research pertaining to each section. I remember taking a red-eye flight to Boston (actually to visit MIT!) and instead of sleeping, just compiling links upon links of possible sites to pull information from. In fact, the end result was four entire pages of just links, single spaced. On the way back, I actually crawled through them, pulling information from the links. James and I compiled the information. We further solidified our sections by creating a set of tags for our research. Here are those tags:

The research we compiled and later edited and shortened now takes up nearly eight pages. It was interesting to learn about the beginnings of the Internet, and reading about the Morris worm, it seems incredible that one virus (laughed out of MIT ;)) could infect 10% of all computers, a number that seems huge now. We found many more laws pertaining to malware, computer fraud, and phishing than we knew or expected there to be. I, personally, have been startled by the huge number of types of malware, enough to start taking a course on Internet safety (SecurityIQ at InfoSec Institute).

We condensed our research into three different viewpoints, and we explored case studies involving social engineering (see the next post). Finally, James and I discussed how we felt about malware and the ethics behind it, having studied and research it thoroughly. We created a thesis, and then moved on to creating an identifier.

-Sohini