"Cyber, Social Sciences Faculty Collaborate to Study Social Media Attacks With $500K Grant"
Dr. Ahmed Aleroud, associate professor in the Augusta University School of Computer and Cyber Sciences and grant principal investigator, has been awarded a three-year grant totaling $500,622 by the Office of Naval Research's Social Networks and Computational Social Science Program for a project aimed at creating new algorithms to mitigate social cyberattacks. According to faculty members, this project will have a significant impact on cybersecurity intelligence and digital forensics research. In the age of social media, cyberattacks on social media are conducted by one or more actors, including bots and human users. These actors enlist the help of other users to create influence campaigns to polarize topic-oriented groups using various content-based and centrality-based intentional cyber-mediated methods. In order to detect and evaluate the effects of such attacks, including on images, videos, and other multimedia content, this project will investigate current deep-learning techniques like adversarial models. Recent studies have indicated that misinformation spreads in 25 different languages, leading to deaths and injuries. Studies have also revealed several attempts to undermine the power of US governmental institutions by spreading misinformation on social media. One of the world's top ten most spoken languages, Arabic, will be the project's focus. Although some researchers have explored various language-based attacks in Arabic, there has not been much research done on social media attacks and how they affect the targeted nations, including the US. The project will develop a new computational framework for analyzing and mitigating social cyberattacks in Arabic-speaking countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan. The framework will be driven by approaches from social network analysis, data mining, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), graph mining, and more. It will also involve graph centrality and language models to measure how stories are developed to create topic-oriented communities in Arabic social media. This article continues to discuss the goals and support behind the study on social media cyberattacks.