University of Louisiana
Deparment of Computer Science
Oliver Hall, Office 353
301 E. Lewis Street
Lafayette, LA 70503
E: fname[.]lname@louisiana.edu

NEWS

Sep 14, 2026:
Organized the RAISE Workshop, co-located with ESORICS 2026 in Rome, Italy.

Sep 08, 2026:
Paper accepted at ACSAC 2026. Congratulations to Janine Schneider, Jan-Julius Kallenborn, and all co-authors!

Jul 17, 2026:
Two papers accepted at ACM CCS 2026. Congratulations to first authors Soheil Khodayari and Muhammad Danish, and all co-authors!

Dec 16, 2025:
Attended the SaTC Aspiring PI Workshop 2025 at GWU in Washington, DC.

Aug 01, 2025:
Joined the School of Computing and Informatics at UL Lafayette as an Assistant Professor.

Jun 13, 2025:
Attended the Max Planck Institute retreat in Bad Breisig.

See archived news

Welcome!

Short Bio. Since August 2025, I have been an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Informatics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Mar 2023 - Jul 2025), where I worked with Prof. Thorsten Holz. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Orleans under the supervision of Prof. Phani Vadrevu.

Research. My research lies at the intersection of Internet security, cybercrime, web security, and emerging AI-driven threats. I study how attacks and illicit activities operate at scale, the infrastructure and ecosystems that enable them, and how we can build proactive defenses. My work combines large-scale Internet and web measurements with empirical and systems-driven approaches to investigate real-world security and privacy problems.

My current research focuses on:

  • Internet Cybercrime and Abuse: phishing, scams, fraudulent online identities, illicit marketplaces, and other forms of Internet abuse.
  • Illicit and Financial Ecosystems: infrastructure behind illicit campaigns, cryptocurrency abuse, money laundering, and related financial activities.
  • Malicious Web and Social Infrastructure: fraudulent social media accounts, malicious domains, and other infrastructure used to target Internet users.
  • Web and Internet Measurement: large-scale empirical measurements of security and privacy risks affecting users, websites, and online platforms.
  • Emerging Web and AI Security: new attack surfaces involving AI-powered systems and autonomous web agents, including adversarial web content and prompt-injection attacks.

Selected Publications


Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Prevalence, Techniques, and Objectives
Soheil Khodayari, Xuenan Zhang, Bhupendra Acharya, Giancarlo Pellegrino
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026. PDF

Pirates of Charity: Exploring Donation-based Abuses in Social Media Platforms
Bhupendra Acharya, Dario Lazzaro, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Thorsten Holz
ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2025. PDF

Exploration of the Dynamics of Buy and Sale of Social Media Accounts
Mario Beluri, Bhupendra Acharya, Soheil Khodayari, Giada Stivala, Giancarlo Pellegrino, Thorsten Holz
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2025. PDF

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
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2024. PDF

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
USENIX Security Symposium, 2024. PDF

See all publications →


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