[LOGOS] Fri Prof. Michalis Faloutsos

[Emiliano De Cristofaro]

Hi Everyone,

Our special Valentine's Day speaker will Michalis, please see details
below. Hope to see you all on Friday.

Cheers,
Emiliano

SPEAKER
Michalis Faloutsos
UC Riverside

WHEN/WHERE
Friday, Feb 14, 2 PM
In-Person: WCH 203 (strongly preferred)
Zoom: link
<https://ucr.zoom.us/j/98664053204?pwd=quPIPmylgJjHap4VkzPnaaVKk1ndi6.1>

TITLE
Preemptive Security: taking away the first mover advantage of the hackers

ABSTRACT
Can we do better than just waiting for the next attack to happen? We argue
that security can become more proactive in order to minimize the damage
that an attack, such as a DDoS or a virus, can have. Although this is an
ambitious goal, we believe that we are making significant and promising
steps towards it. Specifically, our work consists of the following
"preemptive" thrusts:
a.  We develop, C2Store, an authoritative source of C2 servers, to provide
the most comprehensive information on C2 servers.
b. We identify real malware source code: we develop SourceFinder, a
systematic approach to identify malware repositories on public online
archives like GitHub. We have found 17K such malware repositories, with
high precision (>89%).
c. We develop GeekMan,  a systematic human-inspired approach to identify
similar usernames across online platforms focusing on technogeek platforms.
Our method outperforms previous methods with a Precision of 81-86%. We see
our approach as a fundamental re- search capability, which we made publicly
available on GitHub.
Our initial results are promising and the combined power of our preemptive
security methods can fill in a significant gap in the current security
ecosystem in an effort to take away the first mover advantage that the
hackers enjoy currently.

BIO
Michalis Faloutsos is a faculty member at the Computer Science Dpt and
Director of Entrepreneurship in the University of California Riverside. He
got his bachelor's degree at the National Technical University of Athens
and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.  His interests
include,  network and systems security, online social networks analytics,
and network  measurements. With his two brothers, he co-authored the paper
"On powerlaws of the Internet topology" (SIGCOMM'99), which received the
"Test of Time" award from ACM SIGCOMM.  His research has resulted in more
than 18K citations,  an h-index greater than 56, and an i10-index greater
than 120. His work has been supported by many NSF, DHS, ARL, and DARPA
grants, for a cumulative amount of more than $15M. He is the co-founder of
stopthehacker.com, a web-security start-up, which got acquired by
Cloudflare in November 2013. In Aug 2014, he co-founded programize.com,
which provides product development as a service and grew to 85 people by
its sixth year.



--
Prof. Emiliano De Cristofaro
Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, Riverside
https://emilianodc.com
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