Bogdan Carbunar
School of Computing and Information Sciences
Lecture Information:
- September 18, 2020
- 2:00 PM
- Zoom: Contact SCIS coordinator (Hadi Amini) for zoom credentials if you did not receive the email.
Speaker Bio
Bogdan Carbunar is an associate professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at FIU in Miami. He directs the Cyber Security and Privacy (CaSPR) Lab, where he builds secure and private solutions for distributed systems. His current research interests include fraud and abuse detection, mobile authentication and censorship resistance. His work has received awards and media coverage. He holds a PhD from Purdue University.
Description
Search rank fraud, i.e., the posting of large numbers of fake activities for products hosted in commercial peer-opinion services such as those provided by Google, Apple, Amazon, seeks to give the illusion of grassroots engagement, and boost financial gains, promote malware and even assist censorship efforts. Search rank fraud continues to be a significant problem after years of investment from service providers and the academic community. In this talk we present qualitative and quantitative studies with professional raters that we recruited online and reveal raters who evolved fraud-posting strategies that circumvent and even exploit key assumptions made by fraud detection work. We argue that knowledge of the authentic capabilities, behaviors and strategies employed by empirically validated raters will enable us to develop solutions that efficiently manage and contain search rank fraud.