Publications Summary

I frequently submit research work to renowned venues across various domains, including: (i) security (USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, NDSS, CCS), (ii) privacy (PETS), and (iii) web measurement (WWW, ACM IMC). Below, I highlight my scholarly works published in flagship venues, as well as others currently available on arXiv while under review at conferences. For a complete list of scholarly works, including those beyond published and arXiv submissions, please refer to the CV page.

Publications (Peer-reviewed, Conferences)

1. Pirates of Charity: Exploring Donation-based Abuses in Social Media Platforms
   Bhupendra Acharya, Dario Lazzaro, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Thorsten Holz
   Proceedings of ACM World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2025
   Sydney, Australia, 2025.
   Acceptance Rate: 409/2062 (19.83%)
   Available Pre-print at arXiv (Extended version)
   PDF

2. Understanding Regional Filter Lists: Efficacy and Impact
   Christian Böttger, Nurullah Demir, Jan Hörnemann, Bhupendra Acharya, Norbert Pohlmann,
   Thorsten Holz, Matteo Grosse-Kampmann, Tobias Urban
   Proceedings of The 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)
   Washington, DC, USA, 2025.
   Acceptance Rate: 44/146 (30.13%)
   PDF

3. The Imitation Game: Exploring Brand Impersonation Attacks on Social Media Platforms
   Bhupendra Acharya, Dario Lazzaro, Efren Lopez Morales, Adam Oest, Muhammad Saad,
   Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Lea Schönherr, Thorsten Holz
   Proceedings of The 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security)
   Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2024.
   Acceptance Rate: 382/2176 (17.6%)
   PDF

4. C-FRAME: Characterizing and Measuring in-the-wild CAPTCHA Attacks
   Hoang Dai Nguyen, Karthika Subramani, Bhupendra Acharya, Roberto Perdisci, Phani Vadrevu
   Proceedings of The 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P)
   San Francisco, CA, May 2024.
   Acceptance Rate: 70/601 (11.64%)
   PDF

5. Conning the Crypto Conman: End-to-End Analysis of Cryptocurrency-based Technical Support Scams
   Bhupendra Acharya, Muhammad Saad, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Lea Schönherr, Hoang Dai Nguyen, Adam Oest, Phani Vadrevu, Thorsten Holz
   Proceedings of The 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P)
   San Francisco, CA, May 2024.
   Acceptance Rate: 100/582 (17.18%)
   PDF

6. A Human in Every APE: Delineating and Evaluating the Human Analysis Systems of Anti-Phishing Entities
   Bhupendra Acharya, Phani Vadrevu
   Proceedings of The 19th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA)
   Cagliari, Italy, Jun 29-Jul 1, 2022
   Acceptance Rate: 11/39 (28.2%)
   PDF

7. PhishPrint:Evading Phishing Detection Crawlers by Prior Profiling
   Bhupendra Acharya, Phani Vadrevu
   Proceedings of The 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security)
   Vancouver, BC, Canada, Aug 11-13, 2021
   Acceptance Rate: 246/1316 (18.7%)
   PDF

Publications (arXiv)

1. ScamChatBot: Analysis of Fake Account Recovery on Social Media via Chatbots
   Bhupendra Acharya**, Dominik Sautter**, Muhammad Saad, Thorsten Holz
   ** Both authors equally contributed
   To be submitted to ACM CCS , 2025.
   Available Pre-print at arXiv (arXiv:2412.15072)
   PDF

2. Exploration of the Dynamics of Buy and Sale of Social Media Accounts
   Mario Beluri, Bhupendra Acharya, Soheil Khodayari, Giada Stivala, Giancarlo Pellegrino, Thorsten Holz
   Under Review at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (ACM IMC), 2025.
   Available Pre-print at arXiv (arXiv:2412.14985)
   PDF

3. An Explorative Study of Pig Butchering Scams
   Bhupendra Acharya, Thorsten Holz
   Under Review at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), 2025.
   Available Pre-print at arXiv (arXiv:2412.15423)
   PDF