How UH Professors are Working to Stop Cybercriminals in their Tracks

From stolen email passwords to hacked Facebook accounts, cybercrime is on the rise.

A recent assessment by the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) on the impact of COVID-19 on cybercrime showed a significant target shift from individuals and small businesses to major corporations, governments and critical infrastructure. The agency projects a further increase in cybercrime in the future.

Thankfully, a group of researchers in NSM’s Department of Computer Science is working to stop hackers before they’ve had a chance to strike.

In fact, their research is so promising that the group, involving principal investigator Arjun Mukherjee and co-principal investigator Rakesh Verma, received a three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Office to continue their work.

“Our research team will go beyond commonly-used cyberdefense techniques,” said Verma. “Instead, we will generate new attacks of our own. We want to be proactive rather than reactive. Cybercriminals are getting more creative at each turn, so the idea is to be one step ahead of any type of attack.”

The team is working to design a program that can produce unlimited open-ended attacks. The goal is to develop daily attacks using adversarial machine learning that will help develop new ways to ward off those attacks before they have a chance to be carried out.

“We want to close the loop by subjecting our detectors to these new attacks, so the detectors are continuously learning and improving themselves,” said Mukherjee. “We will compare our techniques against state-of-the-art baselines on diverse datasets in realistic scenarios.”

Learn more about this cutting-edge research.