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Browsing by Author "Shirazi, Hossein, advisor"

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    Machine learning-based phishing detection using URL features: a comprehensive review
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Asif, Asif Uz Zaman, author; Ray, Indrakshi, advisor; Shirazi, Hossein, advisor; Ray, Indrajit, committee member; Wang, Haonan, committee member
    In a social engineering attack known as phishing, a perpetrator sends a false message to a victim while posing as a trusted representative in an effort to collect private information such as login passwords and financial information for personal gain. To successfully carry out a phishing attack, fraudulent websites, emails, and messages that are counterfeit are utilized to trick the victim. Machine learning appears to be a promising technique for phishing detection. Typically, website content and Unified Resource Locator (URL) based features are used. However, gathering website content features requires visiting malicious sites, and preparing the data is labor-intensive. Towards this end, researchers are investigating if URL-only information can be used for phishing detection. This approach is lightweight and can be installed at the client's end, they do not require data collection from malicious sites and can identify zero-day attacks. We conduct a systematic literature review on URL-based phishing detection. We selected recent papers (2018 --) or if they had a high citation count (50+ in Google Scholar) that appeared in top conferences and journals in cybersecurity. This survey will provide researchers and practitioners with information on the current state of research on URL-based website phishing attack detection methodologies. The results of this study show that, despite the lack of a centralized dataset, this is beneficial because it prevents attackers from seeing the features that classifiers employ. However, the approach is time-consuming for researchers. Furthermore, for algorithms, both machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be utilized since they have very good classification accuracy, and in this work, we found that Random Forest and Long Short-Term Memory are good choices of algorithms. Using task-specific lexical characteristics rather than concentrating on the number of features is essential for this work because feature selection will impact how accurately algorithms will detect phishing URLs.
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    Pandemic perceptions: analyzing sentiment in COVID-19 tweets
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Bashir, Shadaab Kawnain, author; Ray, Indrakshi, advisor; Shirazi, Hossein, advisor; Wang, Haonan, committee member
    Social media, particularly Twitter, became the center of public discourse during the COVID-19 global crisis, shaping narratives and perceptions. Recognizing the critical need for a detailed examination of this digital interaction, our research dives into the mechanics of pandemic-related Twitter conversations. This study seeks to understand the many dynamics and effects at work in disseminating COVID-19 information by analyzing and comparing the response patterns displayed by tweets from influential individuals and organizational accounts. To meet the research goals, we gathered a large dataset of COVID-19-related Tweets during the pandemic, which was then meticulously manually annotated. In this work, task-specific transformers and LLM models are used to provide tools for analyzing the digital effects of COVID-19 on sentiment analysis. By leveraging domain-specific models RoBERTa[Twitter] fine-tuned on social media data, this research improved performance in critical task of sentiment analysis. Investigation demonstrates individuals express subjective feelings more frequently compared to organizations. Organizations, however, disseminate more pandemic content in general.