Data integrity protection through security monitoring for just-in-time news feeds

There has recently been a major shift in news related media consumption trends and readers are increasingly relying on just-in-time news feeds versus the traditional newspaper print medium. Cloud-networked infrastructures are being setup by the media companies to aggregate news feeds from affiliates, and to meet the elastic demands of Internet-scale users accessing news feeds. However, cyber attacks could compromise these just-in-time news feed services and hackers could particularly launch data integrity as well as denial-of-service attacks that: (a) tarnish the reputation of media companies and (b) impact the service availability for users. In this paper, we describe data integrity and availability checking techniques to protect just-in-time news feed services against cyber attacks in use cases such as: (a) “Data-in-Motion” — when obtaining just-in-time news feeds (e.g., RSS feeds) from affiliates and (b) “Data-at-Rest” — when compiled news feeds reside within cloud-networked infrastructure for real-time premium subscriber access. Using concepts of distributed trust and anomaly detection and a realistic testbed environment in the DeterLab infrastructure, we show the impact of the different cyber attacks and propose solutions to defend against them.