I welcome applications from students interested in computational/data-mining
approaches to understanding, detecting or preventing cybercrime. Particular
areas of interest might include online fraud, social engineering attacks,
inference from observations of cybercriminals, replicability of security
informatics research, etc.
I currently have three PhD students:
Craig Barnfield, supervised by myself and Prof. Trevor Martin, and sponsored by BT, is studying
the application of artificial intelligence to innovative cybersecurity wargaming.
Luke Gassmann, supervised by myself and Dr. Ryan McConville, is studying
the use of artificial intelligence to identify and inform internet users about ideological echo-chambers.
James Stevenson is studying part-time for
his PhD., supervised by myself and Prof. Awais Rashid.
His research area is the identification of
ideologically-motivated cybercriminals.
Project students
As part of my teaching duties I regularly supervise undergraduates and
taught postgraduates as they tackle their individual projects. I try to keep projects
I supervise within my research area, so they are interesting to me and could be
of wider value to others. I list past students' projects here, as they're a good
indicator of topics I am working on or would like to explore.
2020/2021
Qihang Zhang: "Cybersecurity research datasets: A replication and extension"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Harrison Grace: "Exploring toxicity within online gaming forums using BERT"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Ronel Mehmedov: "Automated classification of pet scam websites"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Alfgram Graham: "Automatic detection of fraudulent dating site profiles through use of reverse image searching"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Thomas Armson: "The language of scam-baiting"
[PDF]
[BIB]
James Wickenden: "Attack tree teaching tool"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Andrew Thomas: "'CyBOK of evil': What does a cyber criminal learn from dark web training material?"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Yijing Zhu: "Is content-based filtering still broken?"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Anan Srivastava: "A computational stylometry analysis on underground cryptomarkets to find doppelganger accounts"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Taiquan Yuan: Identifying hackers' roles and examining the evolution
pattern of hackers on hacker forums by clustering and semi-supervised learning
algorithms
[PDF]
[BIB]
Benjamin Price: "Resource networks of pet scam websites"
[PDF]
[BIB]
Josh Hamwee: "Detecting contradictions in online dating profiles"
[PDF]
[BIB]
2018/2019
Sonam Dossani: "Automatically identifying employment relationships in social media"
[PDF]
[BIB]