Invited Speaker

Abstract: The popularity and diverse uses of online social networks (OSNs) have given incentives to hackers and cybercriminals to carry out attacks using malicious software (malware). Given very large populations on social networks (e.g., 2.6 billion users on Facebook), a successful attack can result in tens of millions of user profiles being compromised and computers and devices being infected. This presentation provides an overview of malware threats in OSNs and countermeasures. In this talk, I will first present topological properties of OSNs, namely, low average network distances, power-law distributed node degrees, and high clustering coefficients. I will then discuss different types of malware targeting OSN users as well as countermeasures against OSN malware. The presentation also highlights how the topological properties of OSNs affect the propagation of
malware and design of countermeasures.

Biography: Dr. Uyen T. Nguyen is an associate professor (2008-present) in Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Canada. Her research has been funded by NSERC (National Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada), MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems) and York University. Dr. Nguyen has published actively in high-impact journals and proceedings of international conferences such as IEEE Transactions and conferences. She was a program co-chair of the 2012 International Conference on Mobile, Ubiquitous, and Intelligent Computing, and a publicity co-chair of the 2018 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference. She was also a program vice-chair of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications and the 2012 International Conference on Future Information Technology. Dr. Nguyen is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Multimedia Theory and Applications (2015 – present) and served as a guest editor for six special issues in international journals (Advances in Multimedia, Information Fusion, The Computer Journal, Multimedia Systems, Electronic Commerce Research, Multimedia Tools and Applications). She has been a frequent reviewer of grant applications for NSERC, MITACS, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the National Science Centre of Poland.