[Colloquium] 4/7: Data Science/CS Candidate Talk - Grant Ho (UCSD)

[Rob Mitchum]

*Data Science Institute/Computer Science Candidate Seminar*

*Grant Ho*
*Postdoctoral Fellow*
*University of California, San Diego*

*Thursday, April 7th*
*2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.*
*In Person: John Crerar Library, Room 390*
*Remote: Live Stream <http://live.cs.uchicago.edu/grantho/> or Zoom
<https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96113582369?pwd=bStmRGppR2p6WjZ4NzFCaHJoeVlOUT09>
(details
below)*


*Protecting Organizations with Practical Data-Driven Methods*

Sophisticated attackers routinely compromise enterprise and government
networks, allowing adversaries to steal sensitive data, extort businesses
for millions of dollars, engage in political espionage, and disrupt
critical infrastructure. To address these threats, many organizations
collect extensive amounts of data about their networks and employ teams of
security analysts to detect and stop attacks. Unfortunately, security teams
struggle to use this data to protect their organizations because
conventional techniques are ill-suited to find stealthy and targeted
(unlabeled and rare) attacks in vast, noisy datasets.

My research addresses this problem by developing new data-driven methods
that leverage insights from large, real-world datasets, security domain
knowledge, and collaborations with a variety of commercial and academic
organizations. This talk will explore two systems I’ve built that enable
enterprise security teams to uncover and thwart attacks against their
network. First, I’ll describe a set of methods that organizations can use
to detect spearphishing attacks, mitigating the predominant way that
attackers break into an enterprise’s network. Second, I’ll discuss a system
that can help stop attackers from spreading within an enterprise’s internal
environment, allowing organizations to minimize the damage incurred by
successful breaches. Organizations such as the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, Facebook, and Barracuda Networks have used the ideas from my
research to detect real-world attacks against their networks and improve
the security of millions of users.

*Bio*: Grant Ho <https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~grho/> is a CSE Postdoctoral
Fellow at UC San Diego, where he works with Geoff Voelker and Stefan
Savage. Previously he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, advised by David
Wagner and Vern Paxson. Grant’s research explores how we can effectively
use large-scale data to improve computer security. He is the recipient of
an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Facebook PhD Fellowship; and his
work has been recognized with three distinguished paper awards across the
top security conferences, such as Usenix Security and IEEE Security and
Privacy, and the 2017 Internet Defense Prize.

*Host*: Nick Feamster

*Zoom Info:*
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96113582369?pwd=bStmRGppR2p6WjZ4NzFCaHJoeVlOUT09
Meeting ID: 961 1358 2369
Password: ds2022



-- 
*Rob Mitchum*

*Associate Director of Communications for Data Science and Computing*
*University of Chicago*
*rmitchum at uchicago.edu <rmitchum at ci.uchicago.edu>*
*773-484-9890*
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