The Cybersecurity Lecture Series at Georgia Tech is a free, one-hour lecture from a thought leader who is advancing the field of information security and privacy. Invited speakers include executives and researchers from Fortune 500 companies, federal intelligence agencies, start-ups, and incubators, as well as Georgia Tech faculty and students presenting their research. Lectures are open to all -- students, faculty, industry, government, or simply the curious.

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Abstract: 

Widespread adoption of networking technologies has brought about tremendous economic and social growth, but also exposed individuals and organization to new threats from malicious cyber actors. For example, attacks by WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware crypto works, infected hundreds of thousands of computer systems worldwide, compromising data and critical infrastructure. In order to limit their impact, it is, therefore, critical to detect—and even predict— cyber attacks before they spread. In this talk, I will introduce DISCOVER, an early cyber threat warning system, that mines online chatter from cyber actors on social media, security blogs, and dark web forums, to identify words that signal potential cyber attacks. DISCOVER also generates a timeline of related online discussions on different web sources that can be useful for monitoring emerging cyber threats. 

Bio: 

Sindhu Ernala is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and is a member of the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing lab at the School of Interactive Computing. Her research, which intersects Computational Social Science, Human-Computer Interaction and Applied Machine Learning, aims to study human behavior as manifested on social media in relation to questions around mental health and wellbeing. Specifically, her dissertation focuses on examining the role of social media as a mental health intervention platform. She became interested in the topic of online social data and cyber threats during her internship at the Information Science Institute, University of Southern California.