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The purpose is to enhance the capabilities of a general‐purpose IDS solution with additional knowledge of multimedia file formats and protocols, to better handle multimedia‐specific security exploits.

The authors have designed a multimedia traffic classifier, implemented as an optional preprocessor for Snort. The solution has been successfully tested with downloading and streaming traffic.

Test results confirm that the additional specialized knowledge encoded in the preprocessor results in two significant gains: trusted multimedia contents can be identified and allowed to bypass the detection engine, with substantial computational savings; the IDS is now able to detect multimedia‐specific exploits which would otherwise go unnoticed.

Not all multimedia‐related scenarios have been covered by the described implementation yet. The proposed solution is being extended to other file types and protocols, fine‐tuned, as well as tested more extensively.

Snort users interested in this work will be able to add the multimedia‐specific functionality – and enjoy the resulting benefits – with minimal effort.

The research reported in this paper is – to the authors' knowledge – the first effort to add multimedia‐specific knowledge to the operation of an IDS. In addition to being innovative, the proposed method is relevant for more than one reason, since it enhances the IDS capabilities while at the same time alleviating the computational cost of performing detailed traffic analysis in high‐speed networks.

Focusing on a sample of firms from environmentally sensitive industries over several years, this study aims to reexamine the association between environmental disclosure and environmental performance.

The authors use a panel data analysis to examine how the interaction between environmental performance and economic and legitimacy factors influence firms’ environmental disclosures.

Results suggest that environmental performance moderates the effect of economic and legitimacy incentives on firms’ propensity to provide proprietary environmental disclosure, with both sets of incentives being influential. More specifically, there appears to be a reporting bias based on the firm’s environmental performance whereas the high-performers disclose more environmental information in the three following vehicles: annual report, 10-K and sustainability reports combined. Results also show that economic and legitimacy factors influence the disclosure decisions of the low and high environmental performers differently.

Understanding the determinants of environmental disclosure for high and low environmental performers helps regulators to close the reporting gap between these firms.

There is little evidence to suggest that firms with low-environmental performance attempt to use their disclosures to legitimize their environmental operations.

The study examines environmental disclosures of 78 firms over a period of 14 years in annual, 10-K and sustainability reports. The panel data analysis controls for significant cross-sectional and period effects.