Bio : Dr. Elias Bou-Harb is currently the Director of the Cyber Center For Security and Analytics at UTSA, where he leads, directs and organizes university-wide innovative cyber security research, development and training initiatives. He is also a tenured Associate Professor at the department of Information Systems and Cyber Security specializing in operational cyber security and data science as applicable to national security challenges. Previously, he was a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where he contributed to federally-funded projects related to critical infrastructure security and worked closely with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Dr. Bou-Harb holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, which was executed in collaboration with Public Safety Canada, Industry Canada and NCFTA Canada. His research and development activities and interests focus on operational cyber security, attacks’ detection and characterization, malware investigation, cyber security for critical infrastructure and big data analytics. Dr. Bou-Harb has authored more than 130 refereed publications in leading security and data science venues, has acquired significant state and federal cyber security research grants, and is the recipient of 5 best research paper awards, including the prestigious ACM’s best digital forensics research paper

Date & Time : 8th December at 9:30 AM

Abstract : At least 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2023. Many of these devices transmit critical and sensitive system and personal data in real-time. Collectively known as “the Internet of Things” (IoT), this market represents a $267 billion per year industry. As valuable as this market is, security spending on the sector barely breaks 1%. Indeed, while IoT vendors continue to push more IoT devices to market, the security of these devices has often fallen in priority, making them easier to exploit. This drastically threatens the privacy of the consumers and the safety of mission-critical systems. While a number of research endeavors are currently taking place to address the IoT security problem, several challenges hinder their success. These include the lack of IoT monitoring capabilities once such devices are deployed, the shortage of remediation techniques when they are compromised, and the inadequacy of methodologies to permit the comprehension of the underlying IoT malicious infrastructures.
To this end, this talk will shed the light on research, development and operational security efforts that are taking place at the Cyber Center for Security and Analytics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Specifically, we will discuss how the research community can benefit from rare empirical data to shed light on Internet-scale IoT exploitations. We will also elaborate on an operational cyber security capability that have been developed to address the IoT security pandemic. Last but not least, this talk will pinpoint a few research endeavors that we are currently involved in. This talk hopes to stimulate multidisciplinary research, while enabling cyber security collaborations between academia, private industry and the public sector.