Antonio Nappa defended his PhD thesis “Defending Against Cybercrime: Advances in the detection of Malicious Servers and the Analysis of Client-Side Vulnerabilities.” The thesis focuses on the analysis of two complementary aspects of cybercrime (i.e., computer crime perpetrated through the network to make money). These two aspects are the infected machines used to monetize the crime through different actions (i.e., clickfraud, DDoS, spam) and the server infrastructure used to manage these machines (e.g., C&C, exploit servers, monetization servers, redirectors). In the first part, the thesis investigates the victim machines analyzing which is their exposure to threats over time while, in the second part, Antonio proposes novel active probing techniques to detect and analyze malicious server infrastructures.
Antonio Nappa was advised by IMDEA Software Institute faculty member Juan Caballero and obtained his degree from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid with a “cum laude” mention.