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Current consumer-protection debates focus on the powerful new data-analysis techniques that have disrupted the balance of power between companies and their customers. Online tracking enables sellers to amass troves of historical data, apply…
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web…
With the popularity of smartphones, mobile applications (apps) have penetrated the daily life of people. Although apps provide rich functionalities, they also access a large amount of personal information simultaneously. As a result,…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
Online advertising represents a main instrument for publishers to fund content on the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, a significant number of online advertisements often accommodates potentially malicious content, such as cryptojacking…
Mobile databases are the statutory backbones of many applications on smartphones, and they store a lot of sensitive information. However, vulnerabilities in the operating system or the app logic can lead to sensitive data leakage by giving…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an…
In 2024, the Anti-Phishing Work Group identified over one million phishing pages. Phishers achieve this scale by using phishing kits -- ready-to-deploy phishing websites -- to rapidly deploy phishing campaigns with specific data…
Mobile app markets host millions of apps, yet undesired behaviors (e.g., disruptive ads, illegal redirection, payment deception) remain hard to catch because they often do not rely on permission-protected APIs and can be easily camouflaged…
The large-scale deployment of modern phishing attacks relies on the automatic exploitation of vulnerable websites in the wild, to maximize profit while hindering attack traceability, detection and blacklisting. To the best of our knowledge,…
Frauds severely hurt many kinds of Internet businesses. Group-based fraud detection is a popular methodology to catch fraudsters who unavoidably exhibit synchronized behaviors. We combine both graph-based features (e.g. cluster density) and…
Active re-identification attacks pose a serious threat to privacy-preserving social graph publication. Active attackers create fake accounts to build structural patterns in social graphs which can be used to re-identify legitimate users on…
Counterfeit apps impersonate existing popular apps in attempts to misguide users to install them for various reasons such as collecting personal information or spreading malware. Many counterfeits can be identified once installed, however…
Cryptojacking applications pose a serious threat to mobile devices. Due to the extensive computations, they deplete the battery fast and can even damage the device. In this work we make a step towards combating this threat. We collected and…
Traffic analysis is a type of attack on secure communications systems, in which the adversary extracts useful patterns and information from the observed traffic. This paper improves and extends an efficient traffic analysis attack, called…
In the realm of cybersecurity, phishing stands as a prevalent cyber attack, where attackers employ various tactics to deceive users into gathering their sensitive information, potentially leading to identity theft or financial gain.…
Toll scams involve criminals registering fake domains that pretend to be legitimate transportation agencies to trick users into making fraudulent payments. Although these scams are rapidly increasing and causing significant harm, they have…
The Internet traffic data produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are collected by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and device manufacturers, and often shared with their third parties to maintain and enhance user services.…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…