Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES)
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Submitted by Raghav Rao on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 4:17pm
Insiders pose substantial threats to an organization, regardless of whether they act intentionally or accidentally. Because they usually possess elevated privileges and have skills, knowledge, resources, access and motives regarding internal systems and data, insiders can easily circumvent security countermeasures, steal valuable data, and cause damage. Perimeter and host-based countermeasures like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software are ineffective in preventing and detecting insider threats.
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Submitted by Matthew Jensen on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 3:50pm
Semantic attacks are efforts by others to steal valuable information by imitating electronic communications from a trustworthy source. A common example of a semantic attack is phishing where a phisher sends unsolicited messages to potential targets. When a targeted individual responds, the phisher then steals valuable information from the individual. Semantic attacks flow through established channels of communication (e.g., email, social media) and are difficult to distinguish from legitimate messages.
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Submitted by Robert Axelrod on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 3:46pm
Cybersecurity is threatened by the zero-day exploits (software vulnerabilities that have not been previously disclosed and are therefore potential vectors for attack). The threat is serious for exploits in the hands of major cyber powers that are potentially hostile nations. Publication of a zero-day exploits can enhance the resilience of domestic cyber-infrastructure (if an adversary has discovered the same exploit), and it could give other countries the opportunity to patch their systems proactively, increasing confidence that they will not be penetrated.
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Submitted by Daniela Oliveira on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 3:36pm
Online social engineering attacks have been often used for cybercrime activities. These attacks are low cost and complicate attack attribution. Pure technical defense solutions cannot counter them, which rely on human gullibility. Humans often engage in short-cut decision-making, which can lead to errors. Another expectation is that users should be able to understand complex security tips, which do not consider user demographics. User age has been overlooked in understanding these attacks and user behavior related to them.
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Submitted by Debra Lee Davis on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 3:17pm
Adolescents are at higher risk of engaging in risky behaviors in online social networks. This project develops digital intervention solutions to motivate, educate, support and engender safe social networking behaviors among adolescents. It significantly extends the current understanding of adolescent motivations for engaging in risky online behaviors and the state-of-the-art solutions for reducing adolescent exposure to such behaviors.
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Submitted by Wu He on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 1:44pm
As the use of Web applications has increased, malicious content and cyber attacks are rapidly increasing in both their frequency and their sophistication. For unwary users and their organizations, social media sites such as Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn pose a variety of serious security risks and threats. Recent studies show that social media sites are more in use for delivering malware than were previously popular methods of email delivery. Because of this, many organizations are looking for ways to implement effective security policies.
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Submitted by Deborah Estrin on Wed, 01/03/2018 - 1:27pm
One of the crucial ideas behind Privacy by Design (PbD) is that privacy should be taken into consideration in the process of design, not merely after-the-fact, as so often happens. Yet, this ideal has failed to gain widespread practical traction, challenged, in part, by the lack of developed methodologies and also because of privacy's conceptual complexity, which hampers its operationalization.
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Submitted by Robert LaRose on Tue, 01/02/2018 - 6:01pm
How does the average user cope with the threats they encounter while engaged in the most sensitive of all online activities, online banking? Online Safety for the Ages (OSA) examines generational differences in motivations to use risky online services and self-protective measures in the context of online banking. An influx of older adults attracted to the Internet by social media but at times unfamiliar with dealing with the hazards of online life, as well as younger users who are sometimes oblivious to those dangers, pose distinct challenges to the preservation of online safety.
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Submitted by Philip Howard on Tue, 01/02/2018 - 5:10pm
Political bots are manipulating public opinion over major social networking applications. This project enables a new team of social and information scientists to investigate the impact of automated scripts, commonly called bots, on social media. The PIs will study both the bot scripts and the people making such bots, and then work with computer scientists to improve the way we catch and stop such bots. Experience suggests that political bots are most likely to appear during an international crisis, and are usually designed to promote the interests of a government in trouble.
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Submitted by Yingying Chen on Tue, 01/02/2018 - 5:08pm
This project aims to address privacy concerns of smartphone users. In particular, it investigates how the usages of the smartphone applications (apps) may reshape users' privacy perceptions and what is the implication of such reshaping. There has been recent work that investigates privacy leakage and potential defense mechanisms. However, so far there is only limited understanding on the consequences of such privacy losses, especially when large amount of privacy information leaked from smartphone users across many apps.
