Gianluca Stringhini

About

Gianluca Stringhini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. His research applies a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet. Through the collection and analysis of large-scale datasets, he develops novel and robust mitigation techniques to make the Internet a safer place. His work involves a mix of quantitative analysis, some qualitative analysis, machine learning, crime science, and systems design. Recently, he has investigated the spread of alternative news and memes on online social networks, raids organized by trolls against other Internet users, cyberbullying, ransomware, online dating scams, money laundering schemes linked to cybercrime, malware delivery networks, and online social network compromises.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Social Science
• Internet privacy
• Geography
• Law
• Computer Security
• Cartography

Selected publications

• The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web

  Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · 2020 · 157 citations

  In this paper, we present a large-scale characterization of the Manosphere, a conglomerate of Web-based misogynist movements roughly focused on "men's issues," which has seen significant growth over the past years. We do so by gathering and analyzing 28.8M posts from 6 forums and 51 subreddits. Overall, we paint a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the Manosphere on the Web, showing the links between its different communities over the years. We find that milder and older communities, such…

  DOI

• SoK: Hate, Harassment, and the Changing Landscape of Online Abuse

  2022 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) · 2021 · 133 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We argue that existing security, privacy, and antiabuse protections fail to address the growing threat of online hate and harassment. In order for our community to understand and address this gap, we propose a taxonomy for reasoning about online hate and harassment. Our taxonomy draws on over 150 interdisciplinary research papers that cover disparate threats ranging from intimate partner violence to coordinated mobs. In the process, we identify seven classes of attacks—such as toxic content and…

  DOI

• "Go eat a bat, Chang!": An Early Look on the Emergence of Sinophobic Behavior on Web Communities in the Face of COVID-19

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020 · 97 citations

  The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in unprecedented ways. In the face of the projected catastrophic consequences, many countries have enacted social distancing measures in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus. Under these conditions, the Web has become an indispensable medium for information acquisition, communication, and entertainment. At the same time, unfortunately, the Web is being exploited for the dissemination of potentially harmful and disturbing content,…

• From Victims to Defenders: An Exploration of the Phishing Attack Reporting Ecosystem

  2024-09-29 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Reporting phishing attacks can significantly shorten the time required to take down their operations and deter further victimization by the same phishing websites. However, little research has been conducted to understand the phishing reporting ecosystem and its effectiveness. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the phishing reporting ecosystem to identify the critical challenges people face and their concerns when reporting smishing, vishing, and phishing email attacks. First, we analyze…

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Phases and Themes of Coordinated Online Aggression Attacks

  2024-07-22 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Several polarized online communities have emerged that use discussions on one social media site as a coordination point for like-minded individuals to launch hate messaging attacks against users on other sites. This chapter summarizes a decade of the authors’ research studying coordinated aggression originating from polarized online communities such as 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Board (/pol/), and manifesting themselves on other platforms such as YouTube or Zoom. The chapter presents a taxono…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: SaTC: TTP: Medium: iDRAMA.cloud: A Platform for Measuring and Understanding Information Manipulation

  NSF · $226k · 2023–2025

• CAREER: Towards Data-Driven Methods to Counter Online Aggression

  NSF · $549k · 2020–2025

• SaTC: CORE: Small: Enabling the Automated Delivery of Context-Aware Notifications

  NSF · $77k · 2024–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Jeremy Blackburn

  157 shared

• Emiliano De Cristofaro

  University of California, Riverside

  128 shared

• Savvas Zannettou

  Delft University of Technology

  92 shared

• Michael Sirivianos

  Cyprus University of Technology

  49 shared

• Nicolas Kourtellis

  Telefonica Research and Development

  45 shared

• Ilias Leontiadis

  Meta (United Kingdom)

  42 shared

• Enrico Mariconti

  31 shared

• Adam Doupé

  31 shared

Labs

• Data Mining & Data ManagementPI

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of California, San Diego

  2012

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of California, San Diego

  2009

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Rome 'La Sapienza'

  2007

Awards & honors

• Facebook Secure the Internet Grant (2018)
• Google Faculty Research Award (2015)
• Symantec Research Labs Fellowship (2012)
• multiple best paper awards

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Kate Saenkoh-89
• Ran Canettih-78
• Stan Sclaroffh-69