ABOUT ME

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, where I co-direct the Security Lab (SeclaBU). I am a Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering, and I hold affiliations with the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and the Computer Science Department at BU.

MY RESEARCH

In my research I apply a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet. Through the collection and analysis of large-scale datasets, I develop novel and robust mitigation techniques to make the Internet a safer place. My research involves a mix of systems security, machine learning, quantitative analysis, and qualitative analysis.

I am the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the Early Career Excellence in Research Award from the BU College of Engineering, seven best/distinguished paper awards (IC2E 2024, SECURECOMM 2024, DIMVA 2019, CYBERSAFETY 2019, IMC 2018, eCrime 2017, ACSAC 2010), and eight honorable mentions/impact recognitions (CHI 2024, CSCW 2023, CCS 2022, CHI 2022, CSCW 2021, CSCW 2021, ICWSM 2020, ICWSM 2017).

My research is supported by the NSF, Google, and OpenAI.

RECENT SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

LOKI: Proactively Discovering Online Scam Websites by Mining Toxic Search Queries

Pujan Paudel and Gianluca Stringhini. NDSS, 2026.

Revealing The Secret Power: How Algorithms Can Influence Content Visibility on Twitter/X

Alessandro Galeazzi, Pujan Paudel, Mauro Conti, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Gianluca Stringhini. NDSS, 2026.

Timeliness Matters: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning on Social Media Data to Prioritize High-Risk Conversations for Promoting Youth Online Safety

Ashwaq Alsoubai, Jinkyung Katie Park, Gianluca Stringhini, Meiyi Ma, Munmun De Choudhury, Pamela Wisniewski. ICWSM, 2025.

Enabling Contextual Soft Moderation on Social Media through Contrastive Textual Deviation

Pujan Paudel, Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Rebecca Auger, Chris Wells, and Gianluca Stringhini. USENIX Security, 2024.

PIXELMOD: Improving Soft Moderation of Visual Misleading Information on Twitter

Pujan Paudel, Chen Ling, Jeremy Blackburn, and Gianluca Stringhini. USENIX Security, 2024.

Pandawan: Quantifying Progress in Linux-based Firmware Rehosting

Ioannis Angelakopoulos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Manuel Egele. USENIX Security, 2024.

LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarks

Saad Ullah, Mingji Han, Saurabh Pujar, Hammond Pearce, Ayse Coskun, and Gianluca Stringhini. Oakland, 2024.

TUBERAIDER: Attributing Coordinated Hate Attacks on YouTube Videos to their Source Communities

Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Kostantinos Papadamou, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Gianluca Stringhini. ICWSM, 2024.

Browser Polygraph: Efficient Deployment of Coarse-Grained Browser Fingerprints for Web-Scale Detection of Fraud Browsers

Faezeh Kalantari, Mernoosh Zaeifi, Yeganeh Safaei, Marzieh Bitbab, Adam Oest, Gianluca Stringhini, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doupe. IMC, 2024.

Lambretta: Learning to Rank for Twitter Soft Moderation

Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, and Gianluca Stringhini. OAKLAND, 2023.

Understanding the Use of Images to Spread COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

Yuping Wang, Chen Ling, and Gianluca Stringhini. CSCW, 2023.

Getting Meta: A Multimodal Approach for Detecting Unsafe Conversations within Instagram Direct Messages of Youth

Shiza Ali, Afsaneh Razi, Seunghyun Kim, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Chen Ling, Munmun De Chowdhury, Pamela Wisniewski, and Gianluca Stringhini. CSCW, 2023.

Sliding into My DMs: Detecting Uncomfortable or Unsafe Sexual Risk Experiences within Instagram Direct Messages Grounded in the Perspective of Youth

Afsaneh Razi, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Seunghyun Kim, Shiza Ali, Gianluca Stringhini, Munmun De Chowdhury, and Pamela Wisniewski. CSCW, 2023.

FirmSolo: Enabling dynamic analysis of binary Linux-based IoT kernel modules

Ioannis Angelakopoulos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Manuel Egele. USENIX Security, 2023.

Non-Polar Opposites: Analyzing the Relationship Between Echo Chambers and Hostile Intergroup Interactions on Reddit

Alexandros Efstratiou, Jeremy Blackburn, Tristan Caulfield, Gianluca Stringhini, Savvas Zannettou, Emiliano De Cristofaro. ICWSM, 2023.

CERBERUS: Exploring Federated Prediction of Security Events

Mohammad Naseri, Yufei Han, Enrico Mariconti, Yun Shen, Gianluca Stringhini, and Emiliano De Cristofaro. ACM CCS, 2022.

Why So Toxic? Measuring and Triggering Toxic Behavior in Open-Domain Chatbots

Wai Man Si, Michael Backes, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Savvas Zannettou, and Yang Zhang. ACM CCS, 2022.

Finding MNEMON: Reviving Memories of Node Embeddings

Yun Shen, Yufei Han, Zhikun Zhang, Min Chen, Ting Yu, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang, and Gianluca Stringhini. ACM CCS, 2022.

TrollMagnifier: Detecting State-Sponsored Troll Accounts on Reddit

Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Shiza Ali, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, and Gianluca Stringhini. OAKLAND, 2022.

A Large-scale Temporal Measurement of Android Malicious Apps: Persistence, Migration, and Lessons Learned

Yun Shen, Pierre-Antoine Vervier, and Gianluca Stringhini. USENIX Security, 2022.

Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth: Analyzing Media Shared within Safe versus Unsafe Private Conversations on Instagram

Shiza Ali, Afsaneh Razi, Seunghyun Kim, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Joshua Gracie, Munmun De Choudhury, Pamela Wisniewski, Gianluca Stringhini. CHI, 2022.