Nektarios Leontiadis

About me

Current

I am a Security Engineering Manager at Meta (fka Facebook). I support a distributed team of highly skilled engineers who work on systems and infrastructure that provide a range of capabilities for security investigations. I joined the company in 2014 as a Threat Research Scientist and worked on providing a better understanding of the threat ecosystem targeting the Facebook Family of Apps. 

As of the 2023 Fall semester, I am also an Adjunct Instructor in the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). 

Education

In August 2014 I received a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) from CMU. I worked on empirical measurements and economic modeling of online crime, towards understanding and structuring effective countermeasures. The title of my PhD thesis is Structuring Disincentives for Online Criminals. In this effort I was fortunate to be advised by Nicolas Christin and funded by CyLab.

I hold a B.Sc. in Computer Science, and an M.Sc. in Information Systems from the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB).

Relevant publications

• J. Onaolapo, N. Leontiadis, D. Magka, G. Stringhini. SocialHEISTing: Understanding Stolen Facebook Accounts. In proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX'21). Virtual due to COVID-19. August 2021. [paper]

• L. DeKoven, T. Pottinger, S. Savage, G. Voelker, N. Leontiadis. Following Their Footsteps: Characterizing Account Automation Abuse and Defenses. In Proceedings of the 18th Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'18). Boston, MA, USA. November 2018. [paper]

• S.Farooqi, F. Zaffar, N. Leontiadis, Z. Shafiq. Measuring and Mitigating OAuth Access Token Abuse by Collusion Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'17). London, UK. November 2017. [paper, Best paper award, CACM Research Highlight]

• L. DeKoven, S. Savage, G. Voelker, and N. Leontiadis. Malicious Browser Extensions at Scale: Bridging the Observability Gap between Web Site and Browser. In Proceedings of 10th USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET'17). Vancouver, Canada. August 2017. [paper]

• N. Leontiadis, and A. Hutchings. Scripting the crime commission process in the illicit online prescription drug trade. Journal of Cybersecurity, 2015. [paper]

• N. Leontiadis, T. Moore, and N. Christin. A Nearly Four-Year Longitudinal Study of Search-Engine Poisoning. In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'14). Scottsdale, Arizona. November 2014. [paper]

• N. Leontiadis, and N. Christin. Empirically measuring WHOIS misuse. In Proceedings of the 19th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'14). Wroclaw, Poland. September 2014. [paper]

• N. Leontiadis. Structuring Disincentives for Online Criminals. PhD Thesis. Carnegie Mellon University. August 2014.

  • Nominated for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award. 

  • [thesis]

• N. Leontiadis, and N. Christin. WHOIS Misuse Study. ICANN, March 2014. [report, ICANN]

• N. Leontiadis, T. Moore, and N. Christin. Pick Your Poison: Pricing and Inventories at Unlicensed Online Pharmacies. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'13), pages 621-638. Philadelphia, PA. June 2013. [paper]

• T. Moore, N. Leontiadis, and N. Christin. Fashion Crimes: Trending-Term Exploitation on the Web. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'11), pages 455-466. Chicago, IL. October 2011. [paper]

• N. Leontiadis, T. Moore, and N. Christin. Measuring and Analyzing Search-Redirection Attacks in the Illicit Online Prescription Drug Trade. In Proceedings of the 20th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX'11), pages 281-298. San Francisco, CA. August 2011. [paper]