Álvaro Herrero

Daniel Urda, Branly Martínez, Nuño Basurto et al.

Websites, as essential digital assets, are highly vulnerable to cyberattacks because of their high traffic volume and the significant impact of breaches. This study aims to enhance the identification of web traffic attacks by leveraging machine learning techniques. A methodology was proposed to extract relevant features from HTTP traces using the CSIC2010 v2 dataset, which simulates e-commerce web traffic. Ensemble methods, such as Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting, were employed and compared against baseline classifiers, including k-nearest Neighbor, LASSO, and Support Vector Machines. The results demonstrate that the ensemble methods outperform baseline classifiers by approximately 20% in predictive accuracy, achieving an Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) of 0.989. Feature selection methods such as Information Gain, LASSO, and Random Forest further enhance the robustness of these models. This study highlights the efficacy of ensemble models in improving attack detection while minimizing performance variability, offering a practical framework for securing web traffic in diverse application contexts.

Michal Choras, Konstantinos Demestichas, Agata Gielczyk et al.

Fake news has now grown into a big problem for societies and also a major challenge for people fighting disinformation. This phenomenon plagues democratic elections, reputations of individual persons or organizations, and has negatively impacted citizens, (e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US or Brazil). Hence, developing effective tools to fight this phenomenon by employing advanced Machine Learning (ML) methods poses a significant challenge. The following paper displays the present body of knowledge on the application of such intelligent tools in the fight against disinformation. It starts by showing the historical perspective and the current role of fake news in the information war. Proposed solutions based solely on the work of experts are analysed and the most important directions of the application of intelligent systems in the detection of misinformation sources are pointed out. Additionally, the paper presents some useful resources (mainly datasets useful when assessing ML solutions for fake news detection) and provides a short overview of the most important R&D projects related to this subject. The main purpose of this work is to analyse the current state of knowledge in detecting fake news; on the one hand to show possible solutions, and on the other hand to identify the main challenges and methodological gaps to motivate future research.