Typosquatting is a blackhat practice that relies on human error and low-cost domain registrations to hijack legitimate traffic from well-established websites. The technique is typically used for phishing, driving traffic towards competitors or disseminating indecent or malicious content and as such remains a concern for businesses. We take a fresh new look at this well-studied phenomenon to exp...

Influenza virus, a highly infectious ssRNA virus, replicates in the nucleus of host cells. This unusual feature brings the possibility that the virus may hijack host small noncoding RNA metabolism. Influenza small viral RNA production has been examined in vitro but has not yet been studied in an in vivo setting. We assessed small RNA species from influenza virus during mouse infection by mining...

Data indicate that mirroring and anticipation constitute design principles of the brain. Mirroring resides in the sensory properties of neural systems previously believed to be purely motor (i.e., mirror systems), while anticipation resides in the fact these mirroring centers are involved in cerebellar-cortical circuits that are able to embody command-feedback regularities and, as a result, sim...

Bacterial infection relies on the micro-organism's ability to orchestrate the host's cell signalling such that the immune response is not activated. Conversely, the host cell has dedicated signalling pathways for coping with intrusions by pathogens. The autophagy of foreign micro-organisms (known as xenophagy) has emerged as one of the most powerful of these pathways, although the triggering mo...

The bone marrow microenvironment is characterized by its multicellular nature, and perhaps less obviously by the high mobility of multiple transient and stationary cell lineages present in this environment. The trafficking of hematopoietic and mesenchymal cells between the bone marrow and blood compartments is regulated by a number of bone marrow-derived factors. It is suspected that transforme...

Bartonella spp. and Brucella spp. are closely related α-proteobacterial pathogens that by distinct stealth-attack strategies cause chronic infections in mammals including humans. Human infections manifest by a broad spectrum of clinical symptoms, ranging from mild to fatal disease. Both pathogens establish intracellular replication niches and subvert diverse pathways of the host's immune system...

Phone features, e.g., 911 call, voicemail, and Do Not Disturb, are critical and necessary for all deployed VoIP systems. In this paper, we empirically investigate the security of these phone features. We have implemented a number of attacks and experimented with VoIP services by leading VoIP service providers Vonage, AT&T and Gizmo. Our experimental results demonstrate that a man-in-the-middle ...

Browser-based Single Sign-On (SSO) protocols relieve the user from the burden of dealing with multiple credentials thereby improving the user experience and the security. In this paper we show that extreme care is required for specifying and implementing the prototypical browser-based SSO use case. We show that the main emerging SSO protocols, namely SAML SSO and OpenID, suffer from an authenti...

The ubiquitin proteasome system is a key regulator of many biological processes in all eukaryotes. This mechanism employs several types of enzymes, the most important of which are the ubiquitin E3 ligases that catalyse the attachment of polyubiquitin chains to target proteins for their subsequent degradation by the 26S proteasome. Among the E3 families, the SCF is the best understood; it consis...

Benzodiazepines are widely prescribed drugs used to treat anxiety and insomnia, induce muscle relaxation, control epileptic seizures, promote anaesthesia or produce amnesia. Benzodiazepines are also abused for recreational purposes and the number of benzodiazepine abusers is unfortunately increasing. Within weeks of chronic use, tolerance to the pharmacological effects can develop and withdrawa...