About me

I currently am in the job market!

My full CV is here.

In short

I am a curious and passionate individual interested in the cybercriminal ecosystem supporting attacks at scale and promoting innovation.

In September 2019, I began my PhD at the Security Group of Eindhoven University of Technology under the supervision of dr. Luca Allodi, and in March 2024 I defended my PhD thesis titled “Understanding and Characterizing the Cybercriminal Ecosystem Enabling Attack Innovation at Scale”. In my work, I integrate concepts from economics and criminology to characterize cybercriminal marketplaces fostering innovation and enabling attacks at scale to identify those posing more damaging real-world threats.

Previously, I’ve completed my studies cum laude in Computer Sciences and Engineering at Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Italy in 2019; the master thesis has been published in the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (WACCO) held at IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy 2019 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Research overview

My research focuses on how cybercriminal communities support the provisioning of offensive cyber capabilities for an arbitrary threat actor, leading to the discovery of emerging underground criminal business models and to the derivation of attacker preferences to characterize victims and inform a cyber-risk model. To achieve this, I study how to circumvent adversarial countermeasures to investigation and infiltration in blackmarkets. Thanks to the collected data and to the achieved foodhold in tenths of cybercriminal communities, I propose an evaluation framework for cybercriminal marketplaces supporting attack innovation.

Personal

In my spare time, I enjoy bouldering, cycling anywhere I can, hiking, tinkering (I’m on a mission to repair everything I can), playing piano and CTFs on HackTheBox; my handle is alphacentauri. With some friends, we have a blog where we (seldom) used to publish writeups of the boxes we own on HackTheBox.