Anh V. Vu

From January 2022 to January 2025, I was a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge (Hughes Hall College), supervised by Professor Alice Hutchings and advised by Professor Ross Anderson within the Security Group, where I was fully funded by the Department of Computer Science and Technology. From October 2019 to December 2024, I worked as a research assistant at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre under Dr Richard Clayton, Professor Alice Hutchings, and Professor Ross Anderson.

From June to July 2024 I visited Delft University of Technology to work with Associate Professor Rolf van Wegberg on a research project co-funded by the Dutch Law Enforcement on the facilitators of financial cybercrime. I was a research intern at National University of Singapore (2019) advised by 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 Professor Xuan Hieu Phan.

My research offers timely empirical measurements to explore cyberspace and its societal impact at scale, focusing on underground subcultures fostering online crime and harm. The resulting insights help better understand online threats and inform policy decisions for safety and security. I am also interested in cyberlaw and internet policy. I am keen on collaborating with industry professionals, law enforcement, cybercrime offenders, and users of online communities. My recent work explores how these online communities react to external events, such as law enforcement and industry interventions, the Covid-19 pandemic, and armed conflicts. Before joining Cambridge, I worked on Bitcoin peer-to-peer network security and applied formal methods for malware analysis.

I have been collecting and sharing large-scale datasets of online wickedness such as cyberattacks, illicit marketplaces, and online discussions on underground forums. These include over 300,000 defacement attack records spanning two decades, more than 200,000 contractual transactions on the Hack Forums marketplace, and around 65 million posts on extremist forums. All datasets are made available to academic researchers upon request, provided by the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. Or just drop me a line!

• Program committees
  • International Workshop on Cryptoasset Analytics (CAAW) 2025
  • Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC) 2025
  • ACM World Wide Web Conference (WWW) 2024
  • ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022 (shadow)
• Reviewers
  • Journal of Cybersecurity 2024
• External reviewers
  • APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime) 2024
  • USENIX Security Symposium (SEC) 2024, 2023
  • EuroS&P Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (WACCO@EuroS&P) 2022

Research Talks

• Beyond Whack-A-Mole: Disrupting Online Crime and Harms through Law Enforcement and Industry Efforts
  • Security Seminar, University of Cambridge, UK (in person, 03 Dec, 2024)
• Yet Another Diminishing Spark: Low-level Cyberattacks in the Israel-Gaza Conflict
  • CCC'24 Cambridge Cybercrime Conference, University of Cambridge, UK (in person, 10 Jun 2024)
• Armed Conflicts and the Changing Behaviour of Low-level Cybercrime Actors
  • S&P'24 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (short talk), San Francisco, USA (in person, 21 May 2024)
• No Easy Way Out: the Efficacy of Deplatforming Forums to Suppress Hate and Harassment
  • SHB'24 Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour, Harvard University, USA (in person, 05 Jun 2024)
  • S&P'24 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, USA (in person, 20 May 2024)
  • CCC'23 Cambridge Cybercrime Conference, University of Cambridge, UK (in person, 22 Jun 2023)
• Bored of Cyberwar: the Role of Low-level Cybercrime Actors in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict:
  • DSO National Laboratories, Singapore (in person, 17 May 2024)
  • WWW'24 ACM World Wide Web Conference, Sentosa, Singapore (in person, 15 May 2024)
  • CCC'22 Cambridge Cybercrime Conference, University of Cambridge, UK (in person, 05 Sep 2022)
• ExtremeBB: A Database for Research into Online Hate, Harassment, the Manosphere and Extremism
  • WOAH@ACL'23 ACL Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, Toronto, Canada (online, 13 Jul 2023)
• PostCog: A 'Search Engine' Enabling Interdisciplinary Research into Underground Forums at Scale
  • WACCO@EuroS&P'22 IEEE EuroS&P Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations, Genoa, Italy (in person, 06 Jun 2022)
  • Security Seminar, University of Cambridge, UK (online, 27 May 2022)
• Turning Up the Dial: the Evolution of a Cybercrime Market Through Set-Up, Stable, and Covid-19 Eras
  • IMC'20 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, Pittsburgh, USA (online, 29 Oct 2020)
• Formal Semantics Extraction from Natural Language Specifications for ARM
  • FM'19 International Symposium on Formal Methods, Porto, Portugal (in person, 11 Oct 2019)

Podcasts

• Hackting Out: Defacement and Hate Online amid Global Conflicts, with Michael Joyce and Professor Alice Hutchings.