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People form judgments and make decisions based on the information that they observe. A growing portion of that information is not only provided, but carefully curated by social media platforms. Although lawmakers largely agree that…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
The success of generative AI relies heavily on training on data scraped through extensive crawling of the Internet, a practice that has raised significant copyright, privacy, and ethical concerns. While few measures are designed to resist a…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive web-crawled corpora. This poses risks of leakage, including personal information, copyrighted texts, and benchmark datasets. Such leakage leads to undermining human trust in AI due to…
"If we make this change to our code, how will it impact our clients?" It is difficult for library maintainers to answer this simple-yet essential!-question when evolving their libraries. Library maintainers are constantly balancing between…
In the face of large-scale automated social engineering attacks to large online services, fast detection and remediation of compromised accounts are crucial to limit the spread of new attacks and to mitigate the overall damage to users,…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Recently, privacy issues in web services that rely on users' personal data have raised great attention. Unlike existing privacy-preserving technologies such as federated learning and differential privacy, we explore another way to mitigate…
Open source software brings benefit to software community, but also introduces legal risks caused by license violations, which result in serious consequences such as lawsuits and financial losses. To mitigate legal risks, some approaches…
Domain probe lists--used to determine which URLs to probe for Web censorship--play a critical role in Internet censorship measurement studies. Indeed, the size and accuracy of the domain probe list limits the set of censored pages that can…
The term filter bubble has been coined to describe the situation of online users which---due to filtering algorithms---live in a personalised information universe biased towards their own interests.In this paper we use an agent-based…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
We present a study of how local frames (i.e., iframes loading content like "about:blank") are mishandled by a wide range of popular Web security and privacy tools. As a result, users of these tools remain vulnerable to the very attack…
Website owners make conscious and unconscious decisions that affect their users, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks in the process. In this paper we introduce PrivacyScore, an automated website scanning portal that…
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been introduced as essential and popular security gates that inspect incoming HTTP traffic to filter out malicious requests and provide defenses against a diverse array of web-based threats. Evading…
Increasingly, web content is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) with little human input. We call this "LLM-dominant" content. Since LLMs plagiarize and hallucinate, LLM-dominant content can be unreliable and unethical.…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
The World Wide Web, a ubiquitous source of information, serves as a primary resource for countless individuals, amassing a vast amount of data from global internet users. However, this online data, when scraped, indexed, and utilized for…
Current content filtering and blocking methods are susceptible to various circumvention techniques and are relatively slow in dealing with new threats. This is due to these methods using shallow pattern recognition that is based on regular…
The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…