Pinaki Mohanty

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting more devices every day. Security is critical to ensure that the devices operate in a trusted environment. The lack of proper IoT security encourages cybercriminals to target many smart devices across the network and gain sensitive information. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are common in the IoT infrastructure and involve hijacking IoT devices to consume resources and interrupt services. This may specifically vandalize the application running the service that the end users are trying to access (application layer DDoS attacks) or flood the network bandwidth leading to network failure (software defined network DDoS attacks). This article proposes a hybrid attention-based bidirectional long short term memory (LSTM) with convolutional neural networks (CNN) to identify DDoS attacks in the application layer and SDN. We deploy several other machine learning models like logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, K-nearest neighbors, extreme gradient boosting, artificial neural networks, CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM to evaluate the performance of our proposed model. The evaluation metrics considered for the study are accuracy, precision, recall, and F-1 score. The experimental analysis on multiple datasets exhibits that the proposed model performs the classification efficiently with an accuracy of 99.74% and 99.98%.

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus in late 2019 brought severe devastation to the world. The pandemic spread across the globe, infecting more than ten million people and disrupting several businesses. Although social distancing and the use of protective masks were suggested all over the world, the cases seem to rise, which led to worldwide lockdown in different phases. The rampant escalation in the number of cases, the global effects, and the lockdown may have a severe effect on the psychology of people. The emergency protocols implemented by the authorities also lead to increased use in the number of multimedia devices. Excessive use of such devices may also contribute to psychological disorders. Hence, hence it is necessary to analyze the state of mind of people during the lockdown. In this paper, we perform a sentiment analysis of Twitter data during the pandemic lockdown, i.e., two weeks and four weeks after the lockdown was imposed. Investigating the sentiments of people in the form of positive, negative, and neutral tweets would assist us in determining how people are dealing with the pandemic and its effects on a psychological level. Our study shows that the lockdown witnessed more number positive tweets globally on multiple datasets. This is indicative of the positivity and optimism based on the sentiments and psychology of Twitter users worldwide. The study will be effective in determining people’s mental well-being and will also be useful in devising appropriate lockdown strategies and crisis management in the future.