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Presenter: Dr. Konstantin Beznosov - Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Supervisor:

Date: Fri, May 22, 2015
Time: 13:30:00 - 14:30:00
Place: ECS 660

ABSTRACT

Abstract:

In its 2014 earnings report, Facebook estimated that up to 15 million (%1.2) of its monthly active users are in fact "undesirable," representing fake accounts that are used in violation of the site's terms of service. For such OSNs, the existence of fakes leads advertisers, developers, and investors to distrusting their reported user metrics, which negatively impacts their revenues. Attackers create and automate fake accounts for various malicious activities, including social spamming, malware distribution, political astroturfing, and private data collection. It is therefore important for OSNs to detect fake accounts as quickly and accurately as possible. In this talk I will discuss the issue of fake and other undesirable accounts in OSNs and recent advances in their detection.

Biography:

Dr. Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, where he directs the Laboratory for Education and Research in Secure Systems Engineering. His research interests are usable security, mobile security and privacy, security and privacy in online social networks, and web security. Prior UBC, he was a Security Architect at Hitachi Computer Products (America) and Concept Five. Besides many academic papers on security engineering in distributed systems, he is also a co-author of "Enterprise Security with EJB and CORBA" and "Mastering Web Services Security" books, as well as XACML and several CORBA security specifications. He has served on program committees and/or helped to organizeSOUPS, ACM CCS, IEEE Security & Privacy, NSPW, NDSS, ACSAC, SACMAT. Prof. Beznosov is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) and Elsevier's Computers & Security.

For further information, contact:
Dr. Stephen W. Neville
http://www.inspire.ece.uvic.ca/