Speaker: Shuang Hao
Title: Data-Driven Techniques Against Cybercrime Operations
Abstract: Modern day cybercrime has become a heavy burden on the Internet
ecosystem and caused increasing loss to end users, ranging from scam
websites to message abuse to compromise of bank accounts. The explosive
growth of online services and user-generated data facilitate the
engagement in illegal activities. Mitigating emerging threats require
both gathering empirical measurement to understand the operation
logistics of attack campaigns and developing practical defense
mechanisms.
In this talk, I will describe my work on using data-driven approaches to
detect and disrupt cybercrime operations. First, I will present a
proactive DNS reputation system that we developed to detect malicious
domains early, at time-of-registration, rather than later at
time-of-use. Then I will present approaches to mitigate spam-related
activities and an analysis on scams that monetize stolen credit cards.
Finally, I will discuss other such threats and highlight the potential
of leveraging data aggregated from various vantage points to address a
broad range of security and privacy problems.
Bio: Shuang Hao is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science at the
University of California, Santa Barbara working with Prof. Christopher
Kruegel and Prof. Giovanni Vigna. His research focuses on anomaly
detection, underground economics, DNS analysis, and web and mobile
security. His work has been covered by various major media including MIT
Technology Review, Wall Street Journal, WIRED, Slashdot, and
KrebsOnSecurity. He was awarded the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges
Program Award. He obtained his Ph.D. in the School of Computer Science
at the Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof.
Nick Feamster.