Nicole Beebe, Ph.D.

Melvin Lachman Endowed Chair, Professor, Information Systems and Cyber Security

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Bio

Nicole L. Beebe holds a Ph.D. in business administration with a concentration in information technology from The University of Texas at San Antonio, an MS in criminal justice from Georgia State University and a BS in electrical engineering from Michigan Technological University. She has over twenty years of industry, academic and government experience in cybersecurity and digital forensics. She was a computer crime investigator for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 1998-2007. She was a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) for nearly two decades, was a licensed private investigator in the state of Texas to conduct digital forensic investigations and provide court testimony and held three professional certifications in digital forensics (CCFP, EnCE, ACE) for many years.

Her research interests relate to cybersecurity, cyber analytics, and digital forensics, with applications to insider threat, Internet of Things, threat hunting, and quantum computing. She has received $14 million in research funding since 2013 from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and various industry partners, and her publications have appeared in venues including USENIX Security, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and Communications of the ACM.

Professor Beebe serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Computers & Security and annually on several top-tier, international digital forensics conferences. She is a senior member of both IEEE and the ACM, and is a member of the Association for Information Systems and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’ Digital and Multimedia Sciences section, as well as a senior fellow of the Information Systems Security Association. 

Research Interests

  • Cyber analytics
  • Cybersecurity
  • Digital forensics

Degrees

  • Ph.D. The University of Texas at San Antonio
  • MS Georgia State University
  • BS Michigan Technological University

Publications

  • “Towards Targeted Obfuscation of Adversarial Unsafe Images using Purification and Counterfactual Super Region Attribution Explainability,” with Bethany Mazal, Samuel Henrique Silva, Paul Rad, Andrew Seong and Nishant Vishwamitra, USENIX Security '23, August 9-11, 2023
  • “Virtual Reality for Improving Cyber Situational Awareness in Security Operation Centers,”  with Brita Munsinger and Turquoise Richardson, Computers & Security, 2023, Vol. 132, September  
  • “A Literature Survey of Security Issues in Cloud, Fog, and Edge IT Infrastructure,“ with Patricia Akello and Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Electronic Commerce Research, 2022, pp 1-35
  • “Non-destructive data acquisition methodology for IoT devices: a case study on Amazon Echo Dot version 2,” with Robin Verma, Albert Villarreal and Oren Upton, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022, Vol. 5, No. 1
  • “Deepfake Forensics Analysis: An Explainable Hierarchical Ensemble of Weakly Supervised Models,” with Paul Rad, Ian Scarff, Samuel Henrique Silva and Alexis Votto, Forensic Science International: Synergy, 2022, Vol 4. No. 1000217
  • “Detecting Internet of Things Attacks using Distributed Deep Learning,” with Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Gonzalo De La Torre Parra and Paul Rad, Journal of Network & Computer Applications, 2022, Vol. 208, December -- 2022 Best Paper Award
  • “Dark Triad and Insider Threats in Cyber Security,” with Michele Maasberg, Timothy Selwyn Ellis and Craig Van Slyke, Communications of the ACM, 2020, Vol. 63, No. 12, pp 64-80
  • “IoT Botnet Forensics: A Comprehensive Digital Forensic Case Study on Mirai Botnet Servers,” with Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Oren Upton and Xiaolu Zhang, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual DFRWS Europe, June 4, 2020
  • “The Impact of Power Imbalance on Cyberbullying: The Role of Bystander Intervention,” with Zahra Aivazpour, Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2020), December 13-15, 2020
  • “Cybersecurity: Rethinking the Definition of Insider Threat,” with Frederick R. Chang, The BRIDGE: Linking Engineering & Society, National Academy of Engineering, 2019, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp 12-19
  • “How do I share my IoT forensic experience with the broader community? An automated knowledge sharing IoT forensic platform,” with Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo and Xiaolu Zhang, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2019, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp 6850-6861
  • “Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Privacy Preserving Deep Vision for Real-Time Object Identification and Tracking,” with Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Paul Rad, Samuel Henrique Silva and Mahesh Umapathy, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2019, Vol. 131, pp 147-160
  • “Cyberbullying: Investigating the Roles of Power and Communication Medium,” with Zahra Aivazpour, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), New Orleans, Louisiana, August 16, 2018
  • “AI Thinking for Cloud Education Platform with Personalized Learning,” with Yoris Au, Paul Rad, Mehdi Roopaei and Mehdi Shadaram, Proceedings of The 51st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Big Island, Hawaii, January 3-6, 2018
  • “Insider Threat Detection Using Time-Series Based Raw Disk Forensic Analysis,” with Lishu Liu and Zi Ye, Advances in Digital Forensics XIII, G. Peterson and S. Shenoi (eds.), Boston: Springer, 2017, pp. 149-167
  • “Data Type Classification: Hierarchical Class-to-Type Modeling,” in Advances in Digital Forensics XII, Boston: Springer, 2016, pp. 325-343.
  • "No Fear: Investigating Psychopathy and Information Security Policy Compliance in Relation to Insider Threat," with Michele Maasberg and John Warren, Proceedings of IFIP WG8.11/WG11.13 Dewald Roode Information Security Workshop at the University of Delaware, October 2-3, 2015
  • “The Dark Side of the Insider: Detecting the Insider Threat Through Examination of Dark Triad Personality Traits,” with Michele Maasberg and John Warren, Proceedings of The 48th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Kauai, Hawaii, January 5-8, 2015
  • “Clustering Digital Forensic String Search Output,” with Lishu Liu, Journal of Digital Investigation, 2014, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp 314-32
  • “Ranking Algorithms for Digital Forensic String Search Hits," with Lishu Liu, Proceedings of DFRWS2014, Digital Investigation, 2014, Vol. 11, No. S2, pp S124-S132. (Acceptance rate: 28.85%)
  • “Sceadan: Using Concatentated N-Gram Vectors for Improved Data/File Type Classification,” with Laurence A. Maddox, Lishu Liu and Minghe Sun, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2013, Vol. 8, No. 9, pp. 1519-1530.
  • “Detecting Threatening Insiders with Lightweight Media Forensics,” with Simson Garfinkel, Lishu Liu and Michele Maasberg, Proceedings of the 13th annual IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security, Boston, Massachusetts, November 12-14, 2013
  • “Post-Retrieval Search Hit Clustering to Improve Information Retrieval Effectiveness: A Digital Forensics Case Study,” with Jan Guynes Clark, Glenn B. Dietrich, Myung S. Ko and Daijin Ko, Decision Support Systems (DSS), 2011, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp 732-744
  • “Digital Forensic Research: The Good, The Bad, and The Unaddressed,” Advances in Digital Forensics V, G. Peterson and S. Shenoi (eds.), Boston: Springer, 2009, pp 17-33
  • “A New Process Model for Text String Searching,” with Glenn Dietrich, Advances in Digital Forensics III, P. Craiger and S. Shenoi (eds.), Boston: Springer, 2007, pp 179-191
  • “Digital Forensic Text String Searching: Improving Information Retrieval Effectiveness by Thematically Clustering Search Results,” with Jan Guynes Clark, Proceedings of DFRWS2007, Digital Investigation, 2007, Vol. 4, No. 51, pp S49-S54.
  • "Dealing with Terabyte Datasets in Digital Investigations," with Jan Guynes Clark, Research Advances in Digital Forensics, M. Pollitt and S. Shenoi (eds.), Norwell: Springer, 2005, pp. 3-16
  • (2005) “A Hierarchical, Objectives-Based Framework for the Digital Investigations Process,” with Jan Guynes Clark, Digital Investigation, 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp 146-166