- PhD Student / Research Staff
I am a PhD student supervised by Associate Professor Alice Hutchings and advised by Professor Ross Anderson within the Security Group. I am fully funded by the Department of Computer Science and Technology. I am also affiliated with the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. My major is computer science, but I enjoy the interdisciplinary work that I am doing on cybercrime, which enables me to see things from different viewpoints, not necessarily limited to computer science but more broadly in criminology, psychology, economics, ethics, policy and law. My personal webpage is here.
Biography
I have been a research assistant at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre since October 2019 under Dr Richard Clayton and Associate Professor Alice Hutchings. I was a research intern at the National University of Singapore (2019) advised by Assistant Professor Min Suk Kang (now he is at KAIST). I completed my MSc in Information Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (2018) under Professor Mizuhito Ogawa and my BSc in Information Technology at Vietnam National University (2016), advised by Associate Professor Xuan Hieu Phan.
Research
I am interested in all things cybersecurity, particularly collecting, watching, and measuring online wickedness. I am collecting large-scale datasets about bad things online (e.g., cyberattacks, illicit online marketplaces and hacking discussions on underground forums), and then conducting quantitative and qualitative measurements based on that. My recent work focuses on the impact of externalities on cybercrime, including how industry disruption, law enforcement intervention, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have impacted the cybercrime ecosystem and criminal behaviour. I am also interested in cyberlaw and internet policy. Before joining Cambridge, I worked on network attacks against Bitcoin and applied formal methods for malware analysis.
Themes
Teaching
Supervisions at Cambridge
- Algorithms: Sutton Trust Summer School 2022 (12 students)
- Database: Michaelmas 2223 for Clare, Emmanuel, Selwyn, and Downing College (15 students)
- Software and Security Engineering: Easter 2122, for King's and Robinson College (14 students), Easter 2223 for Clare, Emmanual, Selwyn, King's, and Fitzwilliam College (23 students)
- Object-Oriented Programming: Michaelmas 2122 for Robinson and Fitzwilliam College (10 students); Michaelmas 2223 for Gonville & Caius, Trinity Hall, and Kings' College (18 students)
Professional Activities
- Program committee: IMC'22 (shadow TPC), KSE'22, KSE'23
- External reviewer: EuroS&PW'22, USENIX Security'23
- Talks and presentations: FM'19, IMC'20, EuroS&PW'22, Cambridge Cybercrime Conference'22
Publications
Under submission
- Anh V. Vu, Alice Hutchings and Ross Anderson. 2023. No Easy Way Out: The Effectiveness of Deplatforming an Extremist Forum to Suppress Hate and Harassment
- Press coverage: The Register
- Anh V. Vu, Daniel R. Thomas, Ben Collier, Alice Hutchings, Richard Clayton and Ross Anderson. 2022. Getting Bored of Cyberwar: Exploring the Role of Civilian Hacktivists in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
- Press coverage: Associated Press, New Scientist, SC Magazine, The Record, CyberWire.
- Anh V. Vu, Lydia Wilson, Yi Ting Chua, Ilia Shumailov and Ross Anderson. 2021. ExtremeBB: Enabling Large-Scale Research into Extremism, the Manosphere and Their Correlation by Online Forum Data.
Conferences and workshops
- Ildiko Pete, Jack Hughes, Andrew Caines, Anh V. Vu, Harshad Gupta, Alice Hutchings, Ross Anderson, Paula Buttery. 2022. PostCog: A Tool for Interdisciplinary Research into Underground Forums at Scale. In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW'22).
- Anh V. Vu, Jack Hughes, Ildiko Pete, Ben Collier, Yi Ting Chua, Ilia Shumailov, and Alice Hutchings. 2020. Turning Up the Dial: the Evolution of a Cybercrime Market Through Set-up, Stable, and Covid-19 Eras. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'20).
- Press coverage: Hacker News, Cambridge University Research
- Muoi Tran, Inho Choi, Gi Jun Moon, Anh V. Vu, and Min Suk Kang. 2020. A Stealthier Partitioning Attack against Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P'20).
- Press coverage: CoinDesk
- Anh V. Vu, and Mizuhito Ogawa. 2019. Formal Semantics Extraction from Natural Language Specifications for ARM. In Proceedings of International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM'19).
Book chapters
- Lydia Wilson, Anh V. Vu, Ildiko Pete and Yi Ting Chua. 2023. Identifying and Collecting Public Domain Data for Tracking Cybercrime and Online Extremism. In Open Source Investigations in the Age of Google, World Scientific.
