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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
Pages
Posts
My first experience as an Area Chair
Published:Be the AC you would like to have
Traveling (mis)adventures
Published:I am a magnet for unfortunate events while traveling.
Why did I go for a PhD? (P3)
Published:The last entry of this series of posts
Why did I go for a PhD? (P2)
Published:A reflection spanning between 2013–2016
Inspirational Blogs of Researchers
Published:A collection
Why did I go for a PhD? (P1)
Published:A reflection spanning between 2010–2013
SecNoPageLim: Unlimited pages for Appendices and References
Published:My opinion on why we need them.
publications
[CyCon17] Scalable Architecture for Online Prioritisation of Cyber Threats
 Conference Pierazzi, F., Apruzzese, G., Colajanni, M., Guido, A., & Marchetti, M.,  IEEE International Conference on Cyber Conflict, 2017 
 Oneliner: My very first paper! 
[NCA17] Identifying Malicious Hosts Involved in Periodic Communications
 Conference Apruzzese, G., Marchetti, M., Colajanni, M., Zoccoli, G. G., & Guido, A.,  IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, 2017 
 Oneliner: Use one to find many (apparently, this paper has been integrated into a real SIEM product!) 
[TETC17] Detection and Threat Prioritization of Pivoting Attacks in Large Networks
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Pierazzi, F., Colajanni, M., & Marchetti, M.,  IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2017 
 Oneliner: How to detect lateral movement (through pivoting) using Network Flows. 
[CyCon18] On the Effectiveness of Machine and Deep Learning for Cyber Security
 Conference Apruzzese, G., Colajanni, M. Ferretti, L., Guido, A., & Marchetti, M.,  IEEE International Conference on Cyber Conflict, 2018 
 Oneliner: The right paper, at the right time, in the right place? 
[NCA18] Evading Botnet Detectors Based on Flows and Random Forest with Adversarial Samples
  Conference Apruzzese, G., & Colajanni, M.,  IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications [BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD], 2018 
 Oneliner: The first paper using adversarial examples against Botnet Detectors (yes, the title has a typo). 
[CyCon19] Addressing Adversarial Attacks Against Security Systems based on Machine Learning
 Conference Apruzzese, G., Colajanni, M., Ferretti, L., & Marchetti, M.,  International Conference on Cyber Conflict, 2019 
 Oneliner: This is not just a review! We also propose an original defense against Poisoning! 
[NCA19] Evaluating the effectiveness of Adversarial Attacks against Botnet Detectors
  Conference Apruzzese, G., Colajanni, M., & Marchetti, M.,  IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications [BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD], 2019 
 Oneliner: Previously, in [NCA18], we evaded 1 classifier on 1 dataset. Now, we evade 12 classifiers on 4 datasets! 
[Sym20] AppCon: Mitigating Evasion Attacks to ML Cyber Detectors
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Andreolini, M., Marchetti, M., Colacino, V. G., & Russo, G.,  Symmetry, 2020 
 Oneliner: Ensembling ensembles: each detector focuses on a specific attack against a specific network application! 
[TETCI20] Hardening Random Forest Cyber Detectors against Adversarial Attacks
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Andreolini, M., Colajanni, M., & Marchetti, M.,  IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2020 
 Oneliner: Applying Defensive Distillation to Random Forest! 
[TNSM20] Deep Reinforcement Adversarial Learning Against Botnet Evasion Attacks
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Andreolini, M., Marchetti, M., Venturi, A., & Colajanni, M.,  IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2020 
 Oneliner: Offense is the best Defense! At little-to-no performance degradation. 
[DiB20] DReLAB - Deep REinforcement Learning Adversarial Botnet: A benchmark dataset for adversarial attacks against botnet Intrusion Detection Systems
 Journal Venturi, A., Apruzzese, G., Andreolini, M., Colajanni, M., & Marchetti, M.,  Data in Brief, 2021 
 Oneliner: Dataset, code snippet and tutorial for [TNSM20]. 
[IM21] Towards an Efficient Detection of Pivoting Activity
 Workshop Husák, M., Apruzzese, G., Yang, S. J., & Werner, G.,  IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2021 
 Oneliner: Uh-oh! It appears that detecting pivoting on external traffic is unfeasible! 
[DTRAP21] Modeling Realistic Adversarial Attacks against Network Intrusion Detection Systems
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Andreolini, M., Ferretti, L., Marchetti, M., & Colajanni, M.,  ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 2021 
 Oneliner: Using adversarial examples against ML-NIDS is not a feasible strategy. 
[ARES21] On the Evaluation of Sequential Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection
 Conference Corsini, A., Yang, S. J., & Apruzzese, G.,  International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, 2021 
 Oneliner: Are temporal patterns useful for ML-NIDS? Let's test this out with a fair comparison between LSTM and traditional FNN. 
[TNSM22a] The Cross-evaluation of Machine Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Pajola, L., & Conti, M.,  IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022 
 Oneliner: Let's mix 'n match those datasets! 
[DLS22] Concept-based Adversarial Attacks: Tricking Humans and Classifiers Alike
 Workshop Schneider, J., & Apruzzese, G.,  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy – Deep Learning and Security Workshop, 2022 
 Oneliner: What's the point of minimal perturbations if we want to fool humans? 
[DTRAP22] The Role of Machine Learning in Cybersecurity
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Laskov, P., de Oca, E. M., Mallouli, W., Rapa, L. B., Grammatopoulos, A. V., & Franco, F. D.,  ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 2022 
 Oneliner: Explaining ML & Cybersecurity in a notation-free way -- a joint effort involving Researchers, Practitioners and Regulatory Bodies. 
[EuroSP22] SoK: The Impact of Unlabelled Data in Cyberthreat Detection
   Conference Apruzzese, G., Laskov, P., & Tastemirova, A.,  IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy [OUTSTANDING PRESENTATION AWARD], 2022 
 Oneliner: How to properly evaluate semisupervised learning methods. 
[TNSM22b] Wild Networks: Exposure of 5G Network Infrastructures to Adversarial Examples
 Journal Apruzzese, G., Vladimirov, R., Tastemirova, A., & Laskov, P.,  IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022 
 Oneliner: Introducing the "myopic" threat model for adversarial ML attacks. 
[TDSC22] Mitigating Adversarial Gray-Box Attacks against Phishing Detectors
 Journal Apruzzese, G., & Subrahmanian, V.S.,  IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2022 
 Oneliner: A new phishing dataset, and a new defensive mechanism based on feature randomization. 
[ACSAC22] SpacePhish: The Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learning
 Conference  Apruzzese, G., Conti, M., & Yuan, Y.,  Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2022 
 Oneliner: Revisiting adversarial attacks against phishing website detectors—even real ones. (Artifact: Reusable) 
[ICSS22] Cybersecurity in the Smart Grid: Practitioners` Perspective
 Workshop Meyer, J. & Apruzzese, G.,  Industrial Control System Security Workshop (co-located with ACSAC), 2022 
 Oneliner: Elucidating the disconnection between Research and Practice. 
[SaTML23] Real Attackers Don`t Compute Gradients: Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practice
 Conference Apruzzese, G., Anderson, H. S., Dambra, S., Freeman, D., Pierazzi, F., & Roundy, K. A.,  IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, 2023 
 Oneliner: Let's change the domain of adversarial ML. For real. 
[CODASPY23] Attribute Inference Attacks in Online Multiplayer Video Games: a Case Study on Dota2
 Conference Tricomi, P. P., Facciolo, L., Apruzzese, G., & Conti, M.,  ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, 2023 
 Oneliner: We discovered a privacy issue affecting millions of video gamers! 
[JISA23] Dual Adversarial Attacks: Fooling Humans and Classifiers
 Journal Schneider, J., & Apruzzese, G.,  Journal of Information Security and Applications, 2023 
 Oneliner: We extend the [DLS22] paper and we also carry out a user-study! 
[EuroSP23] SoK: Pragmatic Assessment of Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection
 Conference Apruzzese, G., Laskov, P., & Schneider, J.,  IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2023 
 Oneliner: Changing the evaluation methodology of research papers on ML applications for NIDS. 
[ESORICS23] Attacking Logo-based Phishing Website Detectors with Adversarial Perturbations
 Conference Lee, J., Xin, Z., Ng. M. P. S., Sabharwal, K., Apruzzese, G., Divakaran. D. M.,  European Symposium on Research In Computer Security, 2023 
 Oneliner: A novel attack against state-of-the-art DL methods for logo identification, validated via two user-studies. 
[eCrime23] “Do Users fall for Real Adversarial Phishing?” Investigating the Human Response to Evasive Webpages
  Conference Draganovic, A., Dambra, S., Aldana Iuit, J., Roundy, K., Apruzzese, G.,  APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research [Runner-up for BEST PAPER AWARD], 2023 
 Oneliner: The first user-study assessing the human capabilities to recognize real "adversarial" phishing webpages that evaded a real phishing detection system based on deep learning 
[DTRAP23] Multi-SpacePhish: Extending the Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learning
 Journal Yuan, Y. and Apruzzese, G., and Conti. M.,  ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 2023 
 Oneliner: We extend the [ACSAC'22] paper with new experiments by _mixing_ the perturbation spaces! 
[HICSS24] Voices from the Frontline: Revealing the AI Practitioners` viewpoint on the European AI Act
 Conference Koh, F., Grosse, K., Apruzzese, G.,  Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2024 
 Oneliner: What do AI practitioners think about the European regulation? 
[SAC24] Understanding the Process of Data Labeling in Cybersecurity
 Conference Braun, T., Pekaric, I., Apruzzese, G.,  ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2024 
 Oneliner: Nobody ever questioned "how labelling is done by cybersecurity practitioners". We try to uncover this mystery. 
[WWW24] “Are Adversarial Phishing Webpages a Threat in Reality?” Understanding the Users` Perception of Adversarial Webpages
 Conference  Yuan, Y., Hao, Q., Apruzzese, G., Conti, M., & Gang, W.,  The Web Conference, 2024 
 Oneliner: This work is orthogonal to [eCrime23]: adversarial webpages should be compared to non-adversarial ones! 
[WACCO24] The Ephemeral Threat: Attacking Algorithmic Trading Systems powered by Deep Learning
 Workshop Rizvani, A., Laskov, P., Apruzzese, G.,  Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations, 2024 
 Oneliner: We delve into the security of machine learning applications in computational finance. 
[SCC24] Machine Learning in Space: Surveying the Robustness of on-board ML models to Radiation
 Conference Lange, K., Fontana, F., Rossi, F., Varile, M., Apruzzese, G.,  IEEE Space Computing Conference, 2024 
 Oneliner: A joint work with space-industry practitioners. 
[CoG24] “Hey Players, there is a problem…”: On Attribute Inference Attacks against Videogamers
 Conference Eisele, L., Apruzzese, G.,  IEEE Conference on Games, 2024 
 Oneliner: Apparently, game-related research overlooks the privacy risks of the video-gaming ecosystem. 
[SEC24] It Doesn’t Look Like Anything to Me: Using Diffusion Model to Subvert Visual Phishing Detectors
 Conference Hao, Q., Yuan, Y., Diwan, N., Apruzzese, G., Conti, M., & Gang, W.,  USENIX Security Symposium, 2024 
 Oneliner: We design a new attack that bypasses 3 SOTA visual-based phishing website detection systems in an end-to-end fashion, as well as end-users (humans) 
[BPM24] LLM4PM: A case study on using Large Language Models for Process Modeling in Enterprise Organizations
  Conference Ziche, C., Apruzzese, G.,  Business Process Management Conference -- Industry Forum [BEST INDUSTRY FORUM PAPER AWARD], 2024 
 Oneliner: How can LLM be used at the Hilti group for BPM? 
[COSE24] Beyond the West: Revealing and Bridging the Gap between Western and Chinese Phishing Website Detection
 Journal Yuan, Y. and Apruzzese, G., and Conti. M.,  Computers & Security, 2024 
 Oneliner: Apparently, most research on phishing website detection only focused on the Western side of the world... 
[eCrime24] “Hey Google, Remind me to be Phished” Exploiting the Notifications of the Google (AI) Assistant on Android for Social Engineering Attacks
  Conference Weinz, M., Schröer, S. L., & Apruzzese, G.,  APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research, 2024 
 Oneliner: There is a functionality of the Google Assistant that needs to be looked at... 
[CHIPLAY24] “Are Crowdsourcing Platforms Reliable for Video Game-related Research?” A Case Study on Amazon Mechanical Turk
 Workshop Eisele, L., Apruzzese, G.,  Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (WiP track), 2024 
 Oneliner: Game-related user studies should validate the responses collected via AMT. 
[AISec24] When Adversarial Perturbations meet Concept Drift: an Exploratory Analysis on ML-NIDS
 Workshop Apruzzese, G., Fass, A., & Pierazzi, F.,  ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Security, 2024 
 Oneliner: What happens when two popular phenomena in ML security join forces? 
[COMST25] Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) Cybersecurity Scenarios, Trends, and Potential Technologies: A Review
 Journal Suguranaj, N. and Balaji, S. R. A. and Subash Chandar, B. and Rajagopalan, P. and Kose, U. and Loper, D. C. and Mahfuz, T. and Chakraborty, P. and Ahmad, S. and Kim, T. and Apruzzese, G. and Dubey, A. and Strezoski, L. and Blakely, B. and Ghosh, S. and Bharata Reddy, M. J. and Padullaparti, H. V. and Ranganathan, P.,  IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 2025 
 Oneliner: A comprehensive and security-focused review on the broad domain of DERMS 
[HICSS25] “We provide our resources in a dedicated repository”: Surveying the Transparency of HICSS publications
 Conference Pekaric, I., Apruzzese, G.,  Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2025 
 Oneliner: Only a tiny fraction of the HICSS papers published in 2017--2024 have a functional and publicly available repository. 
[SaTML25] SoK: On the Offensive Potential of AI
  Conference Schröer, S. L., Apruzzese, G., Human, S., Laskov, P., Anderson, H. S., Bernroider, E. W. N., Fass, A., Nassi, B., Rimmer, V., Roli, F., Salam, S., Shen, A., Sunyaev, A., Wadhwa-Brown, T., Wagner, I., Wang, G.,  IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, 2025 
 Oneliner: A long-term and community-driven effort to systematize and address the threat of "offensive AI"... 
[CODASPY25] The Ephemeral Threat: Assessing the Security of Algorithmic Trading Systems powered by Deep Learning
 Conference Rizvani, A., Apruzzese, G., & Laskov, P.,  ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, 2025 
 Oneliner: Did you know that very little has been done in the adversarial ML domain w.r.t. ML applications in computational finance? 
[ICWSM25] Elephant in the Room: Dissecting and Reflecting on the Evolution of Online Social Network Research
 Conference Pajola, L., Schroeer, S. L., Tricomi, P. P., Conti, M., Apruzzese, G.,  International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2025 
 Oneliner: What has been done in 17 years of research on online social networks? We investigate this question by creating and analysing the Minerva-OSN dataset. 
[DTRAP25] Using a Stack to Find an AI Needle: Topic Modeling for Cyber Threat Intelligence
 Journal Schröer, S. L., Seideman, J. D., and Luo, S., and Apruzzese, G., and Dietrich, S., and Laskov, P.,  ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 2025 
 Oneliner: We carry out (among others) a user study with CTI practitioners: what do they _want_? And how do they see scholarly literature in CTI? 
[AISec25] E-PhishGEN: Unlocking Novel Research in Phishing Email Detection
  Workshop Pajola, L., Caripoti, Banzer, S., E., Pizzi, S., Conti, M. and Apruzzese, G.,  ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Security [BEST PAPER AWARD], 2025 
 Oneliner: Most research in phishing email detection uses outdated datasets, so we try to make things a bit better. 
[AsiaCCS25] The Impact of Emerging Phishing Threats: Assessing Quishing and LLM-generated Phishing Emails against Organizations
 Conference Weinz, M., Zannone, N., Allodi, L., & Apruzzese, G.,  ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2025 
 Oneliner: We (are the first to) carry out a large-scale and cross-organizational user study on the effectiveness of quishing and LLM-written phishing emails (spoiler alert: they work very well). 
[eCrime25] Department-Specific Security Awareness Campaigns: A Cross-Organizational Study of HR and Accounting
  Conference Pfister, M., Apruzzese, G., & Pekaric, I.,  APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research, 2025 
 Oneliner: Takeaway: instead of looking at an entire organization, security-awareness campaigns should focus on specific departments (as trivial as it may sound, not many papers did this). 
[IntellSystS25] Exploiting AI for Attacks: On the Interplay between Adversarial AI and Offensive AI
 Journal Schröer, S. L., Pajola, L., Castagnaro, A., Apruzzese, G., & Conti, M.,  IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2025 
 Oneliner: There are far too many terms associated to "AI." We examine and clarify them a bit. 
[TWEB25] It’s not Easy: Applying Supervised Machine Learning to Detect Malicious Extensions in the Chrome Web Store
 Journal Rosenzweig, B., Dalla Valle, V., Apruzzese, G., Fass, A.,  ACM Transactions on the Web, 2025 
 Oneliner: Nobody really _tried_ to use supervised ML to detect browser extensions. So, we tried. Results were... 
talks
Evading Botnet Detectors based on Flows and Random Forest with Adversarial Samples
Published:My first conference presentation!
Cybersecurity & Machine Learning
Published:I briefly presented my research to the other lab members of DSAIL!
Big Data Security Analytics
Published:The beginning of my future…
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Adversarial Attacks against Botnet Detectors
Published:After not even two months, I am back to Boston…
ASGARD Hackatons
Published:An intriguing research project I participated in during my PhD.
Big Data Security Analytics: Opportunities and Issues
Published:Data Analytics and Cybersecurity for dummies.
Cybersecurity: Machine Learning and Industry 5.0
Published:I was the Moderator between Academia and Industry!
Adversarial Attacks against ML Agents
Published:Addressing the resilience of AICA against adversarial ML attacks.
Exposure of 5G Network Infrastructures to Adversarial Examples
Published:Anticipation of the [TNSM22b] paper at Huawei!
The relationship between Machine Learning & Cybersecurity
Published:Teaching some MSc. students the link between ML and Cybersecurity
Some Pragmatic Relationships between Machine Learning & Cybersecurity
Published:Anticipation of [DLS22] and [EuroSP22] @ TU Delft!
Concept-based Adversarial Attacks: Tricking Humans and Classifiers Alike
Published:The only presentation done physically at [DLS22]!
SoK: The Impact of Unlabelled Data in Cyberthreat Detection
Published:Once upon a time…
So good that it is bad. On the (re)use of Datasets in Machine Learning Security
Published:A very negative (informal) talk!
Cybersecurity and Machine Learning: Facts and Myths
Published:Going back (close) to my origin!
Doing Practical Research on Machine Learning & Cybersecurity
Published:Revealing some overlooked aspects of ML & Cybersecurity research
Cybersecurity in the Smart Grid: Practitioners` Perspective
Published:These findings are thanks to an excellent BSc. student.
SpacePhish: The Evasion-space of Adversarial Attacks against Phishing Website Detectors using Machine Learning
Published:A joint effort with UniPD, casting light on some overlooked aspects of adversarial ML in the context of phishing website detection.
Real Attackers Don`t Compute Gradients: Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practice
Published:Besides the content of the paper, the talk has a meta-message.
SoK: Pragmatic Assessment of Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection
Published:Revisiting ML in Network Intrusion Detection
Attacking Logo-based Phishing Website Detectors with Adversarial Perturbations
Published:We propose and evade transformers for logo-identification, and validate our attack with user-studies.
Machine Learning, Security, and Practice: a Reflection
Published:Yet-another talk based on our SaTML23 paper
“Do Users fall for Real Adversarial Phishing?” Investigating the Human Response to Evasive Webpages
Published:A breath of fresh air… from the real world.
Voices from the Frontline: Revealing the AI Practitioners` viewpoint on the European AI Act
Published:What do AI practitioners think about the European regulation?
“Hey Players, there is a problem…”: On Attribute Inference Attacks against Videogamers
Published:Apparently, game-related research overlooks the privacy risks of the video-gaming ecosystem.
“Hey Google, Remind me to be Phished” Exploiting the Notifications of the Google (AI) Assistant on Android for Social Engineering Attacks
Published:…looks like the issue has been patched!
When Adversarial Perturbations meet Concept Drift: an Exploratory Analysis on ML-NIDS
Published:What happens when two popular phenomena in ML security join forces?
The many faces of AI in the Phishing-website landscape
Published:What are some ways in which AI can be used in the context of phishing websites?
Elephant in the Room: Dissecting and Reflecting on the Evolution of Online Social Network Research
Published:We quantify the efforts of prior research on Online Social Networks.
Friend or Foe? On the Interplay between Machine Learning and Cybersecurity
Published:This was my first talk to a Summer School (and I loved it).
The Impact of Emerging Phishing Threats: Assessing Quishing and LLM-generated Phishing Emails against Organizations
Published:We (are the first to) carry out a large-scale and cross-organizational user study on the effectiveness of quishing and LLM-written phishing emails (spoiler alert: they work very well).
E-PhishGEN: Unlocking Novel Research in Phishing Email Detection
Published:Most research in phishing email detection uses outdated datasets, so we try to make things a bit better.
