BU Computer Systems Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Bhupendra Acharya, Postdoctoral Researcher, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Talk Title: “Empirical Study on Scams and Attacks on Social Media Platforms”

Abstract: With the ubiquitous of social media, fraudsters use this as an opportunity to trick users through fake profiles performing various social engineering techniques. These attacks cause millions of dollars of financial losses each year. In this talk, the author provides challenges and methodologies in performing large-scale studies on social media platforms to uncover various forms of scams and attacks that are targeted at users. As fraudsters often keep their profile low, identifying fraudulent profiles with limited profile data is challenging. The author proposes methodologies to study fraudulent social media profiles to uncover the modus operandi of the scammers such as creating honeypots and chatbots to interact with scammers. The motivation behind creating honeypots for scammers is to bait targeted groups of fraudsters and campaigns. AI-backed tools such as the use of Large Language Models (ChatGPT) to perform an automated chat interaction with fraudulent profiles, allow researchers and security communities to reveal the scam life cycle and attack categories that are not readily obvious on public profile representation.

Bio: Dr. Bhupendra Acharya is a postdoctoral researcher at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrucken, Germany collaborating with Professor Thorsten Holz. He completed his PhD degree from the University of New Orleans in Dec 2022. He currently leads the Web and Network Security Research Lab at Holz Scientific Group. His research interests lie in web and network security, especially conducting large-scale measurements on web and social media platforms.