Seminar: A Measurement-based approach to combat Social Engineering Attacks on the Internet

When:
10:30 am
Thursday March 2nd, 2023

Where:
Room 1212
Patrick F. Taylor Hall

ABSTRACT

Social Engineering (SE) attacks is a term generally used to denote a broad category of cyber-attacks in which criminals coax users into initiating insecure actions often leading to enormous financial and data losses for individuals as well as organizations. These SE attacks are particularly painful as they brazenly target the most vulnerable populations in the society such as older-aged adults. Aligning with the continued growth of the internet and computing systems into all facets of our daily lives, SE attacks have also been growing both in scope and size. This talk will motivate a measurement-based approach for developing technologies to combat these unyielding attacks. With the help of my past research works, I will outline different measurement vantage points useful for conducting this research. These points span areas such as prevalent SE defenses, SE attack marketplaces as well as the SE attacks themselves.

Krishna Phani Kumar Vadrevu

Krishna Phani Kumar Vadrevu
Canizaro-Livingston Endowed Assistant Professor in Cybersecurity, University of New Orleans

Phani Vadrevu is a Canizaro-Livingston Endowed Assistant Professor in Cybersecurity at the University of New Orleans (UNO). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Georgia (UGA) in 2017. Phani’s research interests lie in all areas of applied internet security and privacy. His research experiences lie in various sub-fields of web and network security such as network-based malware detection and analysis, browser forensics, malicious advertising, phishing, web crawling, browser fingerprinting, telephony scams, and cybercrime measurements. He often applies machine learning techniques to solve security problems. He has multiple publications in top-tier security and metrics conferences such USENIX Security [2021], NDSS [2018, 2017], and ACM IMC [2022x2, 2021, 2020]. His research efforts have received funding support from federal agencies such as DHS and NSF. His work has also won multiple Vulnerability Research Awards from Google for discovering practical abuse-related vulnerabilities.