David Y. Wang
dywang@cs.ucsd.edu
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0404
La Jolla, CA 92093-0404
Hello.
I am a (soon to be graduating!) fifth year PhD Student working broadly in the Systems + Networking + Security groups of the Computer Science Department @ the University of California, San Diego, where I'm advised by Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage.
I expect to graduate by the end of Summer 2014 (September 2014) and am currently searching for a job :)
Prior to returning to Graduate School, I worked for a couple of years implementing features on eBay's Search Engine. And I was largely shaped by my undergraduate experience @ the Univeristy of California, Berkeley.
Recent Publications
- Search and Seizure: The Effectiveness of Interventions on SEO Campaigns, David Y. Wang, Matt Der, Mohammad Karami, Lawrence Saul, Damon McCoy, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Vancouver, Canada, November 2014.
- DSpin: Detecting Automatically Spun Content on the Web, Qing Zhang, David Y. Wang, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, February 2014.[slides]
- Juice: A Longitudinal Study of an SEO Campaign, David Y. Wang, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), San Diego, CA, February 2013. [slides]
- Cloak and Dagger: Dynamics of Web Search Cloaking, David Y. Wang, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Chicago, IL, October 2011. [slides]
- No Plan Survives Contact: Experience with Cybercrime Measurement, Chris Kanich, Neha Chachra, Damon McCoy, Chris Grier, David Y. Wang, Marti Motoyama, Kirill Levchenko, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET), August 2011.
Research Interests
My research interests primarily lie in the realm of e-Crime (the dodgy portion of the Web). Specifically, I'm interested in all aspects of Web Abuse facilitated through Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the art of manipulating search results surreptitiously to promote spam in hopes of acquiring user traffic. This ranges from low level BHSEO mechanisms (e.g., cloaking), to the attackers' infrastructural resources and their organization (e.g., SEO malware, botnets → SEO campaigns), all the way to the underground ecosystems funding BHSEO (e.g., sales of illicit goods, malware distirbution, phishing).
In addditon, I've also worked on:
- Characterizing the underground proxy ecosystem
- Investigating link building BHSEO services
- Analyzing spinning, a BHSEO technique to generate spam content
In general I'm interested in many areas. Feel free to email me if interested in discussing any of the above or any area within Systems + Networking + Security.