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In recent years, mass-broadcast messaging platforms like Telegram have gained prominence for both, serving as a harbor for private communication and enabling large-scale disinformation campaigns. The encrypted and networked nature of these…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
This study explores the prevalence of dark patterns in mobile games that exploit players through temporal, monetary, social, and psychological means. Recognizing the ethical concerns and potential harm surrounding these manipulative…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
With the popularity of mobile devices, mobile applications have become an essential part of people's lives. To provide secure mobile application download channels for users, various modern app markets are maintained by different companies.…
In Online Social Networks (OSN) numerous are the cases in which users create multiple accounts that publicly seem to belong to different people but are actually fake identities of the same person. These fictitious characters can be…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed software development, enabling AI-powered applications known as LLM-based agents that promise to automate tasks across diverse apps and workflows. Yet, the security implications of deploying…
Many activities related to cybercrime operations do not require much secrecy, such as developing websites or translating texts. This research provides indications that many users of a popular public internet marketing forum have connections…
The ubiquity of mobile applications has increased dramatically in recent years, opening up new opportunities for cyber attackers and heightening security concerns in the mobile ecosystem. As a result, researchers and practitioners have…
Advertisement drives the economy of the mobile app ecosystem. As a key component in the mobile ad business model, mobile ad content has been overlooked by the research community, which poses a number of threats, e.g., propagating malware…
Recent measurements of the Windows code-signing certificate ecosystem have highlighted various forms of abuse that allow malware authors to produce malicious code carrying valid digital signatures. However, the underground trade that allows…
The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper…
Android is among the popular platforms running on millions of smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, whose widespread adoption is seen as an opportunity for spreading malware. Adding malicious payloads to cracked applications, often…
This paper provides an overview of how crypto currency and blockchain engineering interacts with the law enforcement. We point out that a large proportion of crypto users are amateur investors and the dominant and the largest segment in…
Nowadays, the usage of smartphones and their applications have become rapidly increasing popular in people's daily life. Over the last decade, availability of mobile money services such as mobile-payment systems and app markets have…
With its lenient moderation policies and long-standing associations with potentially unlawful activities, Telegram has become an incubator for problematic content, frequently featuring conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, and fringe narratives.…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…
People Nearby is a service offered by Telegram that allows a user to discover other Telegram users, based only on geographical proximity. Nearby users are reported with a rough estimate of their distance from the position of the reference…
On a daily basis, law enforcement officers struggle with suspects using mobile communication applications for criminal activities. These mobile applications replaced SMS-messaging and evolved the last few years from plain-text data…