Martin Macak

Masaryk University | MUNI · Laboratory of Software Architectures and Information Systems

The research on using process mining in learning analytics of cybersecurity exercises relies on datasets that reflect the real behavior of trainees. Although modern cyber ranges, in which training sessions are organized, can collect behavioral data in the form of event logs, the organization of such exercises is laborious. Moreover, the collected r...

The pandemic led to an increase of online teaching tools use. One such tool, which might have helped students to stay engaged despite the distance, is gamification. However, gamification is often criticized due to a novelty effect. Yet, others state novelty is a natural part of gamification. Therefore, we investigated whether gamification novelty e...

Cyberattacks perpetrated by insiders are difficult to prevent using traditional security approaches. Often, such attackers misuse legitimate access to the system to conduct an attack, or an external attacker manipulates or masquerades as an insider to gain access, bypassing the security controls. A possible solution to this problem are forensic-rea...

With the advancing digitization of our society, network security has become one of the critical concerns for most organizations. In this paper, we present CopAS, a system targeted at Big Data forensics analysis, allowing network operators to comfortably analyze and correlate large amounts of network data to get insights about potentially malicious...

Currently, numerous approaches exist supporting the implementation of forensic readiness and, indirectly, forensic-ready software systems. However, the terminology used in the approaches and their focus tends to vary. To facilitate the design of forensic-ready software systems, the clarity of the underlying concepts needs to be established so that...

The hands-on cybersecurity training quality is crucial to mitigate cyber threats and attacks effectively. However, practical cybersecurity training is strongly process-oriented, making the post-training analysis very difficult. This paper presents process-mining methods applied to the learning analytics workflow. We introduce a unified approach to...

The digitalization of our society is only possible in secure software systems governing ongoing critical processes. The understanding of mutual interdependencies of events and processes is crucial for cybersecurity. One of the promising ways to tackle these challenges is process mining, which is a set of techniques that aim to mine knowledge from p...

Data-oriented techniques are currently standardly used in the video game domain, providing an interesting insight into the players’ behaviour. However, the game can be seen as a set of steps that are performed for its completion. Therefore, these steps form a process. Process mining is a discipline with a focus on process analysis which can help to...

The digitalization of our society is only possible in the presence of secure and reliable software systems governing ongoing critical processes, so-called critical information infrastructures. The understanding of mutual interdependencies of events and processes is crucial for cybersecurity and software reliability. One of the promising ways to tac...

The digitalization of our society is only possible in secure software systems governing ongoing critical processes. The understanding of mutual interdependencies of events and processes is crucial for cybersecurity. One of the promising ways to tackle these challenges is process mining, which is a set of techniques that aim to mine knowledge from p...

Understanding the processes in education, such as the student learning behavior within a specific course, is a key to continuous course improvement. In online learning systems, students’ learning can be tracked and examined based on data collected by the systems themselves. However, it is non-trivial to decide how to extract the desired students’ b...

With the increasing threat of cybercrime, there is also an increasing need for the forensic investigation of those crimes. However, the topic of systematic preparation on the possible forensic investigation during the software development, called forensic readiness, has only been explored since recently. Thus, there are still many challenges and op...

Nowadays, a variety of Big Data architectures are emerging to organize the Big Data life cycle. While some of these architectures are proposed for general usage, many of them are proposed in a specific application domain such as smart cities, transportation, healthcare, and agriculture. There is, however, a lack of understanding of how and why Big...

Digitalization is currently the key factor for progress, with a rising need for storing, collecting, and processing large amounts of data. In this context, NoSQL databases have become a popular storage solution, each specialized on a specific type of data. Next to that, the multi-model approach is designed to combine benefits from different types o...

Nowadays, a variety of Big Data architectures are emerging to organize the Big Data life cycle. While some of these architectures are proposed for general usage, many of them are proposed in a specific application domain such as smart cities, transportation, healthcare, and agriculture. There is, however, a lack of understanding of how and why Big...

Digitalization of our society brings various new digital ecosystems (e.g., Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, Smart Mobility), which rely on the collection, storage, and processing of Big Data. One of the recently popular advancements in Big Data storage and processing are the graph databases. A graph database is specialized to handle highly connected...

Cyber-security protection of critical systems is one of the major challenges of today. Although the attacks typically originate from attackers with malicious intent, a substantial portion of attack vectors is enabled by unintentional perpetrators, i.e., insiders who cause an incident by negligence, carelessness, or lack of training. Prevention of t...

Big Data processing has become crucial in many domains because the amount of the produced data has enormously increased almost everywhere. The effective selection of the right Big Data processing tool is hard due to the high number and large variety of the available state-of-the-art tools. Many research results agree that there is no one best Big D...

Is our software ready for forensic investigation? Digital forensic investigation is a time-consuming and delicate process, tasked to recover evidence of cybercrime or major failure. Unfortunately, a vast number of software systems do not produce useable evidence. Even if produced, it often contains unnecessary data, is unreliable, or difficult to a...

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is being widely accepted as a modelling notation for visualizing software systems during design and development. UML has thus become part of many software engineering course curricula at universities worldwide, providing a recognized tool for practical training of students in understanding and visualizing softwa...