Blog

What we Know About Eyepyramid

What we Know About Eyepyramid

The day before the EyePyramid case exploded, I received a confidential email with a PDF. It was the scanned copy of the court order for the law enforcement to proceed and arrest the Occhionero brothers. In a few minutes, I noticed that this leaked document was also circulating on various private mailing lists and chat groups I’m part of. At some point, I received a non-redacted copy.

Read More
Mobile (Android) Ransomware

Mobile (Android) Ransomware

I’ve started this project while advising a Master student who was interested in machine learning. As I’ve been using machine learning since around 2006, I was immediately hooked by the idea of using it to determine whether an Android app was trying to lock the target device as part of a ransomware scheme.

Read More
Banksealer: Automatic Banking Fraud Detection

Banksealer: Automatic Banking Fraud Detection

We started this project because we wanted to analyze banking and credit-card transactions and, with as little knowledge as possible, predict whether new ones are fraudulent or not (e.g., due to a banking trojan working on the victim’s computer, made by a cyber criminal with stolen credentials).

Read More

Droydseuss: Android Malware Tracking and Intelligence

We wanted to create a malware tracker similar to ZeusTracker, but for mobile bankers. So we built a tool, DroydSeuss, which uses static analysis to extract relevant C&C endpoints (e.g., phone number, web URLs) and monitors them by running each sample in a sandbox on a daily basis.

Read More

Grab 'n Run: Secure dynamic code loading for Android

A simple and effective Java Library that you can easily add to your Android projects to perform secure dynamic class loading operations.

Read More

Internet of Things. Applicazioni, sicurezza e riservatezza dei dati personali

Sono stato invitato dal Garante per la Protezione dei Dati alla giornata europea della privacy, con richiesta di fare un po’ di chiarezza sul fenomeno IoT. Questo articolo è una versione “verbosa” del mio intervento, che si incentra sui tre fattori che, secondo me, hanno contribuito a dar vita a questo fenomeno: tecnologia accessibile a basso costo, moltitudine di scenari applicativi e media.

Read More

AndRadar: Mobile app Marketplace Monitoring and Reputation Analysis

The main goal of this project is to provide a dashboard to analyze and monitor the spreading of Android malware in marketplaces. AndRadar uses lightweight fingerprints to lookup malware samples without the need to download them from the markets.

Read More

iSnoop: Automatic Eavesdropping from Touchscreen Keyboards

Spying on a person is an easy and effective method to obtain sensitive information, even when the victim is well protected against common digital attacks. Modern mobile devices allow people to perform some information sensitive actions in unsafe places, where anyone could easily observe the victim while typing.

Read More