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Since August 2025, I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette in the School of Computing and Informatics. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Mar 2023 - Jul 2025) and had an amazing opportunity to work with Prof. Dr. Thorsten Holz. I completed my Ph.D. from the University of New Orleans under the supervision of Dr. Phani Vadrevu. My research group often collaborate with researchers from diverse institutes solving real-world applied security issues especially related to Internet cybercrimes and web attacks.

Current Focus. My research group work centers on exploring various aspects of Internet cybercrimes, including phishing, scams, illicit activities, money laundering, and online abuse. The primary objective is to develop effective defense mechanisms against these threats. Our current research spans the following areas: -

i) Creating proactive mechanisms to detect and prevent emerging threats and cybercrimes on the Internet
ii) Exploring the detailed operations of illicit campaigns, including cryptocurrency and money laundering
iii) Detecting fraudulent social media profiles and web domains targeting users in different attack scenarios
iv) Conducting large-scale web measurements at the intersection of privacy and security to identify risks to users and platforms

• Doctoral in Engineering and Applied Sciences Dec 2023 Department of Computer Science, University of New Orleans Thesis: Analyzing the Robustness of Social Engineering Attacks on Defense Systems
• MS in Computer Science (Cyber Security) Dec 2020 Department of Computer Science, University of New Orleans Thesis: PhishPrint: A Novel Framework for Scalable Evaluation of Web Security Crawlers and Mining of Unknown Cloaking Vectors 
• BS in Computer Science Dec 2010 Department of Computer Science, Cameron University

Research Interests: Internet Cybercrime, Web Measurement and Online Attacks, Web Security and Privacy

Xiaowei Chen, Mindy Tran, Bhupendra Acharya, Yixin Zhou. From Harm to Healing: Understanding Individual Resilience after Cybercrimes. In the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), 2026. Acceptance Rate: 1,703/5,753 (29.60%) 

Mario Beluri, Bhupendra Acharya, Soheil Khodayari, Giada Stivala, Giancarlo Pellegrino, Thorsten Holz. Exploration of the Dynamics of Buy and Sale of Social Media Accounts. In the 25th Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2025. Acceptance Rate: 72/305 (23.60%) 

Bhupendra Acharya, Dario Lazzaro, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Thorsten Holz. Pirates of Charity: Exploring Donation-based Abuses in Social Media Platforms. In Proceedings of the ACM World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2025. Acceptance Rate: 404/2062 (19.83%) 

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

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

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

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

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

Bhupendra Acharya, Phani Vadrevu. PhishPrint: Evading Phishing Detection Crawlers by Prior Profiling. In Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2021. Acceptance Rate: 246/1316 (18.7%)

• Innovative and Think Big, HackaFire Amazon Fire TV and Devices Awards
• Offensive Attack, Google Vulnerability Rewards (Twice) 
• Conference Grants, USENIX Registration (2021), DIMVA Travel (2022) 
• List of Honors, Cameron University Dean’s List