Risk Management

The telephony system, which enabled near universal voice communication, has undergone a dramatic change due to technological advances and legal and regulatory changes. Although these changes offer many benefits, including low cost calling and richer functionality, they have introduced new vulnerabilities that can seriously undermine the trust people have in transactions conducted over the telephony channel. In fact, caller impersonation and social engineering over the phone are increasingly being used to commit fraud and steal credentials for online account takeovers.

This project develops methods to provide citizens information about technologies that obstruct, restrict, or tamper with their access to information. Internet users need an objective, independent, third-party service that helps them determine whether their Internet service provider or government is restricting access to content, specific protocols, or otherwise degrading service. Towards this goal, we are (1) monitoring attempts to block or manipulate Internet content and communications; and (2) evaluating various censorship circumvention mechanisms in real-world deployments}.

Malware (e.g., viruses, worms, and Trojans) is software that deliberately fulfills the harmful intent of an attacker. It has been used as a major weapon by the cyber-criminals to launch a wide range of attacks that cause serious damages and significant financial losses to many Internet users. To protect legitimate users from these attacks, the most significant line of defense against malware is anti-malware software products, which predominately use signature-based methods to recognize threats.

Living in an age when services are often rated, people are increasingly depending on reputation of sellers or products/apps when making purchases online. This puts pressure on people to gain and maintain a high reputation by offering reliable and high-quality services and/or products, which benefits the society at large. Unfortunately, due to extremely high competition in e-commerce or app stores, recently reputation manipulation related services have quickly developed into a sizable business, which is termed Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service (REaaS).

Online social networks (OSNs) face various forms of fraud and attacks, such as spam, denial of service, Sybil attacks, and viral marketing. In order to build trustworthy and secure OSNs, it has become critical to develop techniques to analyze and detect OSN fraud and attacks. Existing OSN security approaches usually target a specific type of OSN fraud or attack and often fall short of detecting more complex attacks such as collusive attacks that involve many fraudulent OSN accounts, or dynamic attacks that encompass multiple attack phases over time.