The rapid growth of online services has heightened concerns about user protection from cyber threats, particularly phishing, which poses significant risks to cyber-social security. To this end, we propose a novel tool for phishing detection called U-Proof. Our tool uses both state-of-the-art LLMs and traditional ML models to detect phishing websites. In particular, we evaluate the phishing detection capabilities of different LLMs and compare them with several ML models to analyze the impact of different model architectures on the identification of phishing websites. For a comprehensive experimental evaluation, we use a combination of public and custom datasets. These include active phishing websites from September 2024, as well as URLs from banks and postal services. Furthermore, the tool includes explanations to enhance user awareness of phishing tactics, supporting broader educational efforts to reduce risks.

Assessing human vulnerability in cybersecurity is critical to understanding the relationship between human factors and the security of digital systems. This issue is exacerbated in areas such as public administration due to the sensitive nature of the data and services handled by government agencies, including citizen records, financial data, and national security details. Robust cybersecurity measures and understanding the human factors contributing to incidents are essential to securing public administration systems and maintaining public trust in government institutions. This poster presents ongoing work to develop a new psychometric tool to assess the human factors that play a critical role in cybersecurity incidents.

Today, people of all ages are increasingly using Web platforms for social interaction. Consequently, many tasks are being transferred over social networks, like advertisements, political communications, and so on, yielding vast volumes of data disseminated over the network. However, this raises several concerns regarding the truthfulness of such data and the accounts generating them. Malicious users often manipulate data to gain profit. For example, malicious users often create fake accounts and fake followers to increase their popularity and attract more sponsors, followers, and so on, potentially producing several negative implications that impact the whole society. To deal with these issues, it is necessary to increase the capability to properly identify fake accounts and followers. By exploiting automatically extracted data correlations characterizing meaningful patterns of malicious accounts, in this article we propose a new feature engineering strategy to augment the social network account dataset with additional features, aiming to enhance the capability of existing machine learning strategies to discriminate fake accounts. Experimental results produced through several machine learning models on account datasets of both the Twitter and the Instagram platforms highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach toward the automatic discrimination of fake accounts. The choice of Twitter is mainly due to its strict privacy laws, and because its the only social network platform making data of their accounts publicly available.

Abstract Gestural expressiveness plays a fundamental role in the interaction with people, environments, animals, things, and so on. Thus, several emerging application domains would exploit the interpretation of movements to support their critical designing processes. To this end, new forms to express the people’s perceptions could help their interpretation, like in the case of music. In this paper, we investigate the user’s perception associated with the interpretation of sounds by highlighting how sounds can be exploited for helping users in adapting to a specific environment. We present a novel algorithm for mapping human movements into MIDI music. The algorithm has been implemented in a system that integrates a module for real-time tracking of movements through a sample based synthesizer using different types of filters to modulate frequencies. The system has been evaluated through a user study, in which several users have participated in a room experience, yielding significant results about their perceptions with respect to the environment they were immersed.

Nowadays, the amount of information spread over networks is extremely large, and many sensible data are granted by legitimate owners aiming to exploit different networking services. In particular, the majority of people give their own consent for processing personal data without understanding how network providers will manage them, and if they will be shared among different network providers. In this paper, we propose a tool exploiting visualization techniques in order to make a user aware of how his/her personal data are exchanged and shared during daily web browsing activities. In particular, the proposed tool enables a user to interactively visualize the communication flows during the aforesaid browsing process, and to discover possibly hidden network providers involved in it. Moreover, the graphical interface also provides real-time summary graphs, which show the amount of information acquired from the network. Finally, we performed several users studies aiming to analyse how the tool can improve the user's perception on the privacy issues that s/he is exposed to. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tool.

Nowadays, the human influence often depends on the number of followers that an individual has in his/her own social media context. To this end, the presence of fake accounts is one of the most relevant problems and can potentially have a big impact on many real life and business activities. Fake followers are dangerous for social platforms, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence, which might yield a strong impact on economy, politics, and society. Thus, it is necessary to devise new methodologies enabling the possibility to identify and characterize fake accounts. This work presents a novel technique to discriminate real accounts on social networks from fake ones. The technique exploits knowledge automatically extracted from big data to characterize typical patterns of fake accounts. We empirically evaluated the proposed technique on the Twitter social network, and achieved significant results in terms of discrimination capabilities.