Unraveling Deceptive Digital Personas
- 14:00 20th March 2015 ( week 9, Hilary Term 2015 )Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
Online social media increasingly play a role in the sophisticated tactics employed by cyber criminals. Criminals often hide behind one or more online identities (so-called digital personas) to either mask their activities or gain trust of their victims. Conversely, a single persona may be shared by a group of criminals for such purposes. Unraveling these multiple digital personas is a non-trivial problem owing to the large amounts of text communicated in online social media and the large numbers of digital personas involved. The cognitive load for cybercrime investigators is immense – existing tools lack the sophisticated capabilities required to analyse digital personas in order to provide investigators with clues to the identity of the individual or group hiding behind one or more personas. In this talk I will discuss these challenges and highlight how advances in computational analysis of natural language can help overcome them hence providing a new and powerful tool in the arsenal of cybercrime investigators.
Speaker bio
Professor Rashid is Director of Security Lancaster Research Centre, one of the UK’s Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. He possesses an extensive multi-disciplinary background having worked at the boundary of computer science, social science and psychology for several years. He is particularly focused on sense-making of large, heterogeneous data sources and human factors in order to unravel impacts on cyber resilience of individuals, organisations and infrastructures. He led the development of novel digital persona analysis techniques to unravel the deception tactics deployed by sophisticated cyber criminals online. This work was selected as one of the 100 Big Ideas of the Future by Research Councils UK and Universities UK, and also influenced UK and European policy frameworks. He has also conducted research on analysis of large-scale networks including Internet-scale systems and the security and privacy issues pertaining to large-scale sharing of personal data through social networks. He also researchers novel techniques for detecting sophisticated social engineering attacks and socio-technical factors underpinning online group formation and behaviours. He currently leads a project as part of the UK Research Institute on Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems - researching novel socio-technical metrics for studying and articulating cyber security risks in such environments.Share this:
