Rich Macfarlane
Rich Macfarlane

Rich Macfarlane

Associate Professor

 0131 455 2335

  R.Macfarlane@napier.ac.uk

   

Biography

Rich Macfarlane is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, working in the areas of cyber security and digital forensics since 2009. Rich played a key role in the creation and development of the GCHQ certified MSc Advanced Security and Digital Forensics programme (www.napier.ac.uk/courses/msc-advanced-security-and-digital-forensics-postgraduate-fulltime) and leading the course from 2014. Rich also collaborates with law enforcement, and industry within the Cyber Academy (thecyberacademy.org), which he co-founded with Prof. Bill Buchanan.

Working within the Networking, Cyber Security and Digital Forensics research group, and focused on research in the areas of Offensive Network Security, Ransomware, Digital Forensic Triage, and Online teaching and E-learning for cyber security. Research in teaching for cyber has focused on authentic, immersive virtualised environments and activities, as well as online learning pedagogy. Digital forensic research included techniques for triage which led to a ground breaking Forensic spin-out company Cyan Forensics (cyanforensics.com). Current research in offensive-security includes honeypots for attack analysis, and Ransomware analysis and detection methods including forensic triage of live memory.

Rich is a Senior Teaching Fellow of HEA, and has played a key part in developing the cyber security offering at Edinburgh Napier University including developing online teaching platforms which provide students with virtualised practical learning environments, such as vSOC. Based on student-centered teaching and learning for cyber security and digital investigations these provide authentic practical activities even to our remote students. Rich helped start and continues to support the ENUSEC student cyber security society at the university (enusec.org).

Rich is also heavily involved with the wider cyber security community, especially in Scotland, such as as working with schools to support cyber security engagement and teaching, and helping to start and his current moderator role with the Cyber Scotland Connect (@SecScotland) community organisation. He is also an active member of the NCSC educational community group which is made up of course and research lab leaders from NCSC accredited institutions.

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Editorial Activity

  • Editorial Board - Journal of Cyber Security Technology

 

Fellowships and Awards

  • Senior Teaching Fellow of the HEA

 

Spin-outs and Licences

  • Cyan Forensics

 

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35 results

Comparison of Entropy Calculation Methods for Ransomware Encrypted File Identification

Journal Article
Davies, S., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. (2022)
Comparison of Entropy Calculation Methods for Ransomware Encrypted File Identification. Entropy, 24(10), Article 1503. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24101503
Ransomware is a malicious class of software that utilises encryption to implement an attack on system availability. The target’s data remains encrypted and is held captive by ...

Civil Engineering Graduate Apprenticeships: A feasibility study into development of an MSc programme based on review of current undergraduate provision

Conference Proceeding
Leitch, K., Bernal-Sanchez, J., & Macfarlane, R. (2022)
Civil Engineering Graduate Apprenticeships: A feasibility study into development of an MSc programme based on review of current undergraduate provision. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium for Engineering Education
This paper details the findings of a study undertaken at Edinburgh Napier University to assess the feasibility of developing an existing Graduate Apprentice programme in Civil...

NapierOne: A modern mixed file data set alternative to Govdocs1

Journal Article
Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2022)
NapierOne: A modern mixed file data set alternative to Govdocs1. Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, 40, Article 301330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsidi.2021.301330
It was found when reviewing the ransomware detection research literature that almost no proposal provided enough detail on how the test data set was created, or sufficient des...

Exploring the Need For an Updated Mixed File Research Data Set

Conference Proceeding
Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2022)
Exploring the Need For an Updated Mixed File Research Data Set. In 2021 International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (ICEET) (426-430). https://doi.org/10.1109/iceet53442.2021.9659618
Mixed file data sets are used in a variety of research areas, including Digital Forensics, Malware analysis and Ransomware detection. Researchers recently seem to either have ...

Review of Current Ransomware Detection Techniques

Conference Proceeding
Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2022)
Review of Current Ransomware Detection Techniques. In 2021 International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (ICEET) (696-701). https://doi.org/10.1109/iceet53442.2021.9659643
A review of proposed ransomware detection tools and techniques. The tools are described, compared and contrasted and possible short comings in their approaches are discussed.

Differential Area Analysis for Ransomware Attack Detection within Mixed File Datasets

Journal Article
Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2021)
Differential Area Analysis for Ransomware Attack Detection within Mixed File Datasets. Computers and Security, 108, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2021.102377
The threat from ransomware continues to grow both in the number of affected victims as well as the cost incurred by the people and organisations impacted in a successful attac...

Towards Identifying Human Actions, Intent, and Severity of APT Attacks Applying Deception Techniques - An Experiment

Conference Proceeding
Chacon, J., Mckeown, S., & Macfarlane, R. (2020)
Towards Identifying Human Actions, Intent, and Severity of APT Attacks Applying Deception Techniques - An Experiment. https://doi.org/10.1109/CyberSecurity49315.2020.9138859
Attacks by Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) have been shown to be difficult to detect using traditional signature-and anomaly-based intrusion detection approaches. Deception...

Evaluation of Live Forensic Techniques in Ransomware Attack Mitigation

Journal Article
Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2020)
Evaluation of Live Forensic Techniques in Ransomware Attack Mitigation. Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, 33, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsidi.2020.300979
Ransomware continues to grow in both scale, cost, complexity and impact since its initial discovery nearly 30 years ago. Security practitioners are engaged in a continual "arm...

Wi-Fi Channel Saturation as a Mechanism to Improve Passive Capture of Bluetooth Through Channel Usage Restriction

Journal Article
Lowe, I., Buchanan, W. J., Macfarlane, R., & Lo, O. (2019)
Wi-Fi Channel Saturation as a Mechanism to Improve Passive Capture of Bluetooth Through Channel Usage Restriction. Journal of Networking Technology, 10(4), 124-155. https://doi.org/10.6025/jnt/2019/10/4/124-155
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that provides audio and data links between personal smartphones and playback devices, such as speakers, headsets and car enterta...

The Importance of Authenticity in Cyber Security Training and Education

Presentation / Conference
Macfarlane, R., & Mata de Acuna, J. (2019, November)
The Importance of Authenticity in Cyber Security Training and Education. Presented at JISC Security Conference, Newcastle, England
The knowledge gap between academy and industry is a challenging issue that educators face every day. In the field of cyber security, it is important that students understand t...

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