Welcome to the Security and Privacy Lab

This lab is led by Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Texas Arlington. In this lab, we conduct data-driven research to study online security, privacy and safety. Our research is interdisciplinary and spans across multiple areas, from traditional security and privacy research to data science and social computing research.

Announcements

June 2024	Our paper on AI phishing scams got featured on UTA news. Ana Aleksandric presented our paper "Users’ Behavioral and Emotional Response to Toxicity in Twitter Conversations" as a spotlight talk at the ICWSM 2024. Ana Aleksandric presented our paper "Analyzing the Stance of Facebook Posts on Abortion Considering State-level Health and Social Compositions" as a spotlight talk at the ICWSM 2024. Sayak Saha Roy presented our paper "Unveiling the Risks of NFT Promotion Scams" at the ICWSM 2024.
May 2024	Our paper From Chatbots to Phishbots? received the Distinguished Paper Award from the IEEE S&P 2024. Sayak Saha Roy presented our paper on From Chatbots to Phishbots?: Phishing Scam Generation in Commercial Large Language Models at IEEE S&P 2024 . For the second time, Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh received a research grant from the Comcast Innovation Fund Program to study cybercrime on social media platforms. Thanks, Comcast! Congratulations to Sayak Saha Roy for a travel grant from IEEE S&P 2024. Congratulations to Dr. Mohit Singhal for his successful Ph.D. defense. He will join Northeastern University as an Assistant Teaching Professor.
April 2024	Congratulations to Poojitha Thota for receiving a travel grant from IEEE S&P 2024. Congratulations to Ana Aleksandric for receiving a travel grant from ICWSM 2024. Congratulations to Poojitha Thota for successfully passing her Ph.D. comprehensive exam. Congratulations to Ana Aleksandric for receiving the Ph.D. Summer Fellowship from COE, UTA. Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh received the College of Engineering Outstanding Early Career Research award. Thanks, UTA, COE and CSE! The Wolens Foundation Impact Fund awarded our collaborative project with the School of Social Work to study technology-facilitated abuse.
March 2024	Our paper "Users’ Behavioral and Emotional Response to Toxicity in Twitter Conversations" got accepted to ICWSM 2024. Kudos to Ana Aleksandric for leading this project. Ana Aleksandric participated at HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition as a panelist to discuss benefits of Internships, Mentorships, and Personal Branding. Our paper on "From Chatbots to Phishbots?: Phishing Scam Generation in Commercial Large Language Models" got accepted to IEEE S&P 2024. Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy for leading this project and Poojitha Thota for her great contribution. The detection model is implemented as a ChatGPT plugin and shared on Hugging Face. Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh presented a talk on "Countering Harmful Content in the Digital Age" at the Greater Fort Worth Chapter of PRSA.
Feb. 2024	Our paper “Demonstration of an Adversarial Attack Against a Multimodal Vision Language Model for Pathology Imaging,” has been accepted to IEEE ISBI. Kudos to Poojitha Thota who along with Jai Prakash Veerla led this project and thanks, Dr. Jacob M. Luber for initiating this collaboration. Congratulations to the undergraduate students participated at our OurCS@DFW workshop for receiving the runner-up award for their presentation. Congratulations to Poojitha Thota and Sadegh Moosavi for receiving the SCRF's Honorable Mention awards for their lightning talks and Mohit Singhal for receiving the SCRF's Honorable Mention award for his poster. Organized a workshop on "Utilizing Large Language Models to Detect Phishing Scams" at OURCS@DFW. Thanks to Sayak Saha Roy and Poojitha Thota for their tremendous help.
Nov. 2023	Our paper "Analyzing the Stance of Facebook Posts on Abortion Considering State-level Health and Social Compositions" got accepted to ICWSM 2024. Great work by Ana Aleksandric who led this interdeciplinary project alongside public health experts. Congratulations to Mohit Singhal for successfully passing his Ph.D. proposal defense.
Oct. 2023	Congratulations to Sayak Saha Roy for receiving the Most Impact Talk at the CSE's 50th anniversary. Congratulations to Mohit Singhal for receiving the Audience Choice Award at the CSE's 50th anniversary. Congratulations to Ana Aleksandric for receiving the Honorable Mention Award at the CSE's 50th anniversary. Congratulations to Ana Aleksandric, Sayak Saha Roy, and Mohit Singhal, for being selected as three of the ten Ph.D. students to present lightning talks at the 50th anniversary of our CSE department. Shirin Nilizadeh presented our paper on Phishing in the Free Waters at ACM IMC 2023.
Aug. 2023	Our paper “Phishing in the Free Waters: A Study of Phishing Attacks Created using Free Website Building Services” got accepted at ACM IMC 2023. Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy for leading this project.
July 2023	Our paper on "Unveiling the Risks of NFT Promotion Scams" was accepted to ICWSM 2024. Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy for leading this project. Sadegh Moosavi presented our paper on "Examining StyleGAN as a Utility-Preserving Face De-identification Method" at PETS 2023. Mohit Singhal presented our SoK paper on Content Moderation at IEEE Euro S&P 2023. Congratulations to Mohit Singhal for receiving the student travel grant for Euro S&P 2023.
June 2023	NSF CAREER Award was featured on UTA News Our IEEE Euro S&P'23 paper on Social Media Content Moderation was citied in the official report submitted to The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in European Union. Mohit Singhal presented our Cybersecurity Misinformation Detection paper at ICWSM 2023.
May 2023	Received NSF CAREER Award for "CAREER: Advancing Adversarial Robustness of Natural Language Generation Systems." Thanks, NSF! Our paper on Examining StyleGAN as a Utility-Preserving Face De-identification Method” has been conditionally accepted to PETS 2023. Good work by Sadegh Moosavi.
April 2023	Congratulation to Sayak Saha Roy for successfully passing his Ph.D. comprehensive exams. Ana Aleksandric's research project is featured on UTA News. Our project on social media analysis of security discussions has been featured on UTA News.
March 2023	Our paper on "SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice" got accepted to IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy. Kudos to Mohit Singhal for leading this project.
Feb. 2023	My students, for another year, received several awards at SCRF, including the best (Ana Aleksandric and Sayak Saha Roy) and runner-up awards (Mohit Singhal) for Ph.D. lightning talks and the runner-up award for poster presentations (Mohit Singhal). Congratulations to all. Organized a workshop on "Fairness in Security Applications" at OURCS@DFW. Thanks to Sadegh Moosavi and Mohit Singhal for their tremendous help. Our paper on "Facebook post credibility as a predictor of vaccine hesitancy in the US" has been accepted to MedInfo 2023. Kudos to Ana Aleksandric for leading this project.
Jan. 2023	Awarded an NSF grant, titled "RAPID: SaTC: CORE: Monitoring Social Media for Devising Improved Safeguards Online." Welcome to our REU students, Keren Valdez and Javier Pacheco, for joining our Fairness team.
Nov. 2022	Congratulations to Sayak Saha Roy for being on the UTA's news Congratulations to Ana Aleksandric and Sadegh Moosavi for successfully passing their Ph.D. comprehensive exams.
Oct. 2022	Our paper on “Spanish Facebook Posts as an Indicator of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Texas" published by the Vaccines journal with impact factor of 5.325. Kudos to Ana Aleksandric, who led this interdisciplinary project, collaborating with Public Health Informatics at UTA. Sayak Sah Roy has been selected as a Twitter student ambassador . At the inaugural UTA CSE Mouser Electronics Awards Banquet, Mohit Singhal received the Teaching Assistant Award, Unique Karanjit, our undergraduate student, received Outstanding Recent Undergrad Alumnus Award, and I received the best Per-Tenure Service Award (for organizing OurCS@UTA and SCRF).
Aug. 2022	Our paper on "Cybersecurity Misinformation Detection on Social Media: Case Studies on Phishing Reports and Zoom's Threats" got accepted to ICWSM 2023. Kudos to Mohit Singhal who led this project and mentored Nihal Kumarswamy, our master thesis student, and Shreyasi Kinhekar, our undergraduate student.
May 2022	MIT Technology Review Germany published an article featuring our research project on "Attacks against Ranking Algorithms with Text Embeddings: A Case Study on Recruitment Algorithms." Our paper on “Your Tweets Matter: How Social Media Sentiments Associate with COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the US” got accepted to Online Journal of Public Health Informatics. Kudos to Ana Aleksandric, who led this project. This work is the result of our collaboration with Public Health Informatics at UTA.
April 2022	Congratulations to Nihal Kumarswamy for successully defending his master thesis. Our poster on "Detecting Misinformation about Zoom’s Security and Privacy Threats" received the best technical poster award at NDSS 2022. Congratulations to Sayak Saha Roy for being selected as “John S. Schuchman Outstanding Doctoral Student,” and Nihal Kumarswamy for winning “Verizon Outstanding Master Thesis.” Congratulations to Dr. Rodrigo Augusto Silva Dos Santos for successfully defending and completing his Ph.D.
March 2022	Received Comcast Innovation Fund for Using Social Media as a Novel Source for Identifying Active Phishing Threats. Through a data exchange program, our lab will participate in APWG data collection and sharing activities.
Feb. 2022	Had an interview with WIRED about my master student's, Anahita Samadi, thesis work that got published at BlackBoxNLP 2021, collocated with EMNLP. The article is out and is about How Job Applicants Try to Hack Resume-Reading Software." Very proud of my students for winning all the three SCRF's best awards: Best OURCS@DFW Team Presentation (ThreatFinder Workshop students), best Project Poster/Demo Competition (Mohit Singhal), and best PhD Lightning Talks (Ana Aleksandric). Our workshop was a hit at OurCS@DFW, and it won the best OURCS@DFW Team Presentation award. Workshop: [ThreatFinder] Threat Finder ft. Twitter: Visualizing a Real-Time Security Knowledge base Using Twitter Data High school and undergraduate students: Rachael Rocha, Ryan Lahlou, Utsav Kc, Benjamin Knight, Katia Lopez, Ronghuan Wu, Ruiming Kang, and Timothy Mei TAs: Sayak Sah Roy, and Ana Aleksandric [Slides]
Jan. 2022	Strongly encourage female and underrepresented undergraduate and high school students to participate at any of the 12 workshops at OurCS@DFW . We are organizing one research workshop on "Threat Finder ft. Twitter: Visualizing a Real-Time Security Knowledge base Using Twitter Data." Strongly encourage both undergraduate and graduate students to present their best projects at SCRF .
Dec. 2021	Our work has been covered by several news outlets, including Associated Press News, Global Wire, Yahoo! Finance, and Security Boulevard. We won the best paper award at eCrime 2021 for our paper: "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Phishing Reports on Twitter." UTA publised an article on Ana Aleksandric being selected as a TIGER scholar by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) .
Nov. 2021	Our paper on "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Phishing Reports on Twitter" got accepted to eCrime 2021 . Kudos to Sayak Saha Roy who led this project and mentored Unique Karanjit, our enthusiastic undergraduate student.
Oct. 2021	UTA published an article on Rodrigo receiving the CAHSI Google Dissertation Award. UTA published an article about our NSF award.
Sept. 2021	Congratulations to Rodrigo Augusto Silva Dos Santos, for receiving Google-CAHSI Dissertation Award, which provides financial support to qualified Hispanic doctoral students. Our paper on "Attacks against Ranking Algorithms with Text Embeddings: a Case Study on Recruitment Algorithms" got accepted to BlackboxNLP 2021, collocated with EMNLP 2021.
July 2021	Received NSF award for "III: Medium: Collaborative Research: Fairness in Web Database Applications" with Abolfazl Asudeh (UIC), H. V. Jagadish (UMICH), and Gautam Das (UTA).
June 2021	Our paper on "Adaptive Matrix Pattern Steganography on RGB Images" got accepted to Journal of Cyber Security and Mobility.
April 2021	Our Demo paper on "Attacking Audio Event Detection Deep Learning Classifiers with White Noise" got accepted to PETRA 2021 . Good work by Rodrigo Augusto dos Santos and Ashwitha Kassetty.
Feb. 2021	Our SeeSounds workshop students received the runner-up award at OurCS@DFW. Our paper on "What Remains Uncaught?: Characterizing Sparsely Detected Malicious URLs on Twitter" got accepted to MADWeb 2021, co-located with NDSS 2021. Good work by Sayak Saha Roy and Unique Karanjit.