A paper co-authored by Dr. Damon McCoy and Dr. Rachel Greenstadt of NYU Tandon’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Center for Cybersecurity, recently collected two different honors at the USENIX Security Conference. Titled, “The Tools and Tactics Used in Intimate Partner Surveillance: An Analysis of Online Infidelity Forums,” the paper won both a Distinguished Paper Award, and placed third in the Internet Defense Prize competition, which is jointly sponsored by USENIX and Facebook. The latter honor carries with it a monetary prize of $40,0000.

The winning paper represents the first measurement study of intimate partner surveillance (ISP) strategies. This form of online harassment has previously proven difficult to study because of the “physical access and trust present in the relationship between the target and attacker.” Greenstadt, McCoy, and their coauthors flipped the perspective of other studies by focusing on the attackers rather than the victims. The
team infiltrated five online forums where the means of spying on an intimate partner were openly discussed and, by using a mixed-methods analysis of these forums, were able to identify the tools and tactics used by the attackers.

The paper was presented virtually at USENIX on August 14. In addition to Greenstadt and McCoy, the researchers were Emily Tseng from Cornell University, Rosanna Bellini from Newcastle University in the UK, Nora McDonald from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Matan Danos of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and Nicola Dell and Thomas Ristenpart from Cornell . The presentation slides can be accessed here.