APRIL | Muhammad (Ejaz) Ahmed

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I received PhD from Kyung Hee University of South Korea in 2014 in wireless communication. I worked as postdoctoral researcher in the field of wireless communication and data mining from June 2014 to August 2016. I started my career in cyber security in September 2016 from Sungkyunkwan university of South Korea. I joined CSIRO’s Data61 in June 2018 as a Research Scientist in cyber security.

What gets you excited and motivated about your work/projects?

Voice spoofing attack targeting voice assistants such as, Alexa, Siri, Google Now, is an ever-growing threat. My research on detecting such attacks was accepted to USENIX Security 2020 (A* conference in security) and received coverage from several media outlets. Malware is on rise, and it’s one of the biggest digital infiltration threats to companies. This motivated me to have deeper understanding of malware behaviours. For that, my current research is focusing on early detection of ransomware threat by leveraging system logs.

What qualifications do you have?

PhD

What are you 3 main professional areas?

1. Malware detection,

2. vulnerability detection in source codes,

3. Continuous authentication, machine learning.

What are your 3 main skills?

1. Malware: Malware (specifically ransomware) behavioural analysis and detection

2. Program analysis: Automatic vulnerability detection in source codes using deep language models

3. Continuous authentication: Detecting voice spoofing attacks

What rewards and accolades have you received?

I received SCS Science Excellence award in May 2020 I also received a SCS Collaboration award in November 2020.

Are you currently supervising students?

I am currently supervising the following two students:

1. Chaoran Li, PhD, Swinburne University, 2019 – Present

2. Zian Liu, PhD, Swinburne University, 2019 – Present

Do you have a LinkedIn account?

https://au.linkedin.com/in/ejaz629

Why do you like working at CSIRO's Data61?

In CSIRO’s Data61, we work on cutting edge research and at the same time, we have freedom to work on the problems that we are interested in, which is a big plus.