47 citations · 89 across the 19 of their papers we have counts for
22 papers
False Information, Bots and Malicious Campaigns: Demystifying Elements of Social Media Manipulations
Mohammad Majid Akhtar, Rahat Masood, Muhammad Ikram +1
The rapid spread of false information and persistent manipulation attacks on online social networks (OSNs), often for political, ideological, or financial gain, has affected the op…
SPGNN-API: A Transferable Graph Neural Network for Attack Paths Identification and Autonomous Mitigation
Houssem Jmal, Firas Ben Hmida, Nardine Basta +3
Attack paths are the potential chain of malicious activities an attacker performs to compromise network assets and acquire privileges through exploiting network vulnerabilities. At…
A longitudinal study of the top 1% toxic Twitter profiles
Hina Qayyum, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Ian D. Wood +3
Toxicity is endemic to online social networks including Twitter. It follows a Pareto like distribution where most of the toxicity is generated by a very small number of profiles an…
Use of Cryptography in Malware Obfuscation
Hassan Jameel Asghar, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Muhammad Ikram +4
Malware authors often use cryptographic tools such as XOR encryption and block ciphers like AES to obfuscate part of the malware to evade detection. Use of cryptography may give th…
An Empirical Analysis of SMS Scam Detection Systems
Muhammad Salman, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar
The short message service (SMS) was introduced a generation ago to the mobile phone users. They make up the world's oldest large-scale network, with billions of users and therefore…
An Empirical Assessment of Security and Privacy Risks of Web based-Chatbots
Nazar Waheed, Muhammad Ikram, Saad Sajid Hashmi +2
Web-based chatbots provide website owners with the benefits of increased sales, immediate response to their customers, and insight into customer behaviour. While Web-based chatbots…
5G-Enabled Pseudonymity for Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System
Nardine Basta, Ming Ding, Muhammad Ikram +1
Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) enable communications between vehicles, road-side infrastructures, and road-users to improve users' safety and to efficiently…
A Study of Third-party Resources Loading on Web
Muhammad Ikram, Rahat Masood, Gareth Tyson +2
This paper performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web, to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they did not directly load. Although th…
A deep dive into the consistently toxic 1% of Twitter
Hina Qayyum, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Ian D. Wood +3
Misbehavior in online social networks (OSN) is an ever-growing phenomenon. The research to date tends to focus on the deployment of machine learning to identify and classify types…
Don't be a Victim During a Pandemic! Analysing Security and Privacy Threats in Twitter During COVID-19
Bibhas Sharma, Ishan Karunanayake, Rahat Masood +1
There has been a huge spike in the usage of social media platforms during the COVID-19 lockdowns. These lockdown periods have resulted in a set of new cybercrimes, thereby allowing…
Towards a Zero-Trust Micro-segmentation Network Security Strategy: An Evaluation Framework
Nardine Basta, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar +1
Micro-segmentation is an emerging security technique that separates physical networks into isolated logical micro-segments (workloads). By tying fine-grained security policies to i…
Empirical Security and Privacy Analysis of Mobile Symptom Checking Applications on Google Play
I Wayan Budi Sentana, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar +1
Smartphone technology has drastically improved over the past decade. These improvements have seen the creation of specialized health applications, which offer consumers a range of…
Longitudinal Compliance Analysis of Android Applications with Privacy Policies
Saad Sajid Hashmi, Nazar Waheed, Gioacchino Tangari +2
Contemporary mobile applications (apps) are designed to track, use, and share users' data, often without their consent, which results in potential privacy and transparency issues.…
BlockJack: Towards Improved Prevention of IP Prefix Hijacking Attacks in Inter-Domain Routing Via Blockchain
I Wayan Budi Sentana, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar
We propose BlockJack, a system based on a distributed and tamper-proof consortium Blockchain that aims at blocking IP prefix hijacking in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). In esse…
A Longitudinal Analysis of Online Ad-Blocking Blacklists
Saad Sajid Hashmi, Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tr…
DaDiDroid: An Obfuscation Resilient Tool for Detecting Android Malware via Weighted Directed Call Graph Modelling
Muhammad Ikram, Pierrick Beaume, Mohamed Ali Kaafar
With the number of new mobile malware instances increasing by over 50\% annually since 2012 [24], malware embedding in mobile apps is arguably one of the most serious security issu…
The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading
Muhammad Ikram, Rahat Masood, Gareth Tyson +3
The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load res…
A First Look at Ad Blocking Apps on Google Play
Muhammad Ikram, Mohamed Ali Kaafar
Online advertisers and analytics services (or trackers), are constantly tracking users activities as they access web services either through browsers or a mobile apps. Numerous too…
Measuring, Characterizing, and Detecting Facebook Like Farms
Muhammad Ikram, Lucky Onwuzurike, Shehroze Farooqi +5
Social networks offer convenient ways to seamlessly reach out to large audiences. In particular, Facebook pages are increasingly used by businesses, brands, and organizations to co…
Towards Seamless Tracking-Free Web: Improved Detection of Trackers via One-class Learning
Muhammad Ikram, Hassan Jameel Asghar, Mohamed Ali Kaafar +2
Numerous tools have been developed to aggressively block the execution of popular JavaScript programs (JS) in Web browsers. Such blocking also affects functionality of webpages and…
Combating Fraud in Online Social Networks: Detecting Stealthy Facebook Like Farms
Muhammad Ikram, Lucky Onwuzurike, Shehroze Farooqi +5
As businesses increasingly rely on social networking sites to engage with their customers, it is crucial to understand and counter reputation manipulation activities, including fra…
Characterizing Key Stakeholders in an Online Black-Hat Marketplace
Shehroze Farooqi, Muhammad Ikram, Emiliano De Cristofaro +5
Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook likes, fraudulent search engine o…