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The research by our group focuses on addressing the following three key research areas and their interconnections:
- Cybersecurity Threat Mitigation
- Social-Engineering/Human Factor in Cybersecurity
- User-Authentication
Overview
Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities are causing substantial financial losses
for individuals, organizations, and government agencies all over the world. Such cybersecurity
landscape can be classified under three major pillars: (a) technology/system, (b)
human-computer, and (c) socio-political-organizational (See Figure 1). One of the
weakest links in the cybersecurity chain has to do with the individuals who are using
and protecting such systems.
Levy CyLab Focuses on Human Factor in Cybersecurity
The focus of the Levy CyLab research group is to work on innovative projects related to the human-centric lens (also known as "Human Factor in Cybersecurity") of all three cybersecurity landscape pillars. In the technology/systems pillar, user-authentication has long been a challenge due to the overuse of passwords and the ease at which they can be guessed or cracked along with increased password entropy that impacts employee productivity. In the human-computer pillar, employees’ mistakes, human error, falling to social engineering and phishing attacks due to low cybersecurity awareness, knowledge, competencies, skills, and what is known by the 2002 Nobel Prize Laureate, Princeton University's Professor Daniel Kahneman as “System 1” thinking (or what we call “oh shoot syndrome”) represent the majority of cybersecurity threats to organizations. Moreover, non-IT employees have a low awareness of the magnitude of cybersecurity threats and their impact on organizations, government, and society. On the other hand, increasing complexity for computer systems due to demands for heightened security can cause frustration, resistance, and lower productivity. In the socio-political-organizational pillar, identity theft, social engineering, phishing, and insider threats are on the rise, which poses imminent threats to the reputation as well as the financial stability of individuals, organizations, governments, and societies.
Innovations
Our research focuses on all three cybersecurity pillars by (a) the development of novel approaches to improve user authentication including their role in reducing organizational cyber risk; (b) the development of innovative tools to measure cybersecurity skills and reduction of human errors related to cybersecurity; as well as (c) development of state-of-the-art tools to identify insider-threats, programs to help mitigation of social engineering, phishing attacks, and other cyber threats, along with the protection of privacy and corporate intellectual property, threat mitigation and cybersecurity risk management analysis. Since the early 2000s, the Levy CyLab research group has published over 70 papers in refereed publications, one patent application, seven grants awarded (one internal grant awarded by NSU's Presidents' Research, six external DoD awarded since 2019), six external gifts, and over 40 doctoral students have completed their dissertation research in these areas of cybersecurity.
Research Areas
Our current work continues to focus on the human-centric lens (human factor) of all three cybersecurity pillars with increased emphasis on the development of state-of-the-art tools and prototype applications to assist in the measurement of cybersecurity skills, human errors, identify insider threats, cybersecurity hygiene, along with experimental studies to assist organizations with Business E-mail Compromise (BEC), social engineering and phishing, cyber threat mitigation, improve business continuity plans, resilience, and general cybersecurity risk management.
Give to the CyLab
For contributions to our efforts, please:
Visit the Nova Southeastern University Gift and Donations page
1. Under "Gift Area" - select "College of Computing and Engineering"
2. Under "Gift Donation" - select "Other"
3. Please specify by typing - "For Levy CyLab"
Thank you for the generous contribution!
Principal Investigator (PI)
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Yair Levy, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Computing & Director of CIPhER College of Computing and Engineering |
Current Ph.D. Students and Projects
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Christopher Collins, Ph.D. Candidate Dissertation title: "Development of a Phishing Risk Exposure Taxonomy on Mobile Devices in the Healthcare Industry" cc2409 AT mynsu.nova.edu |
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Jacob Idani, Ph.D. Student Dissertation title: "An Empirical Comparison of Traditional Scripting Language (Python) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT-4) in Persuasion Principles Phishing Emails Classification" ji235 AT mynsu.nova.edu |
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Luke Nabozny, Ph.D. Student Dissertation title: "Identification and Quantification of the Cybersecurity Footprint in Defense Industrial Base Organizations" ln604 AT mynsu.nova.edu |
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Luis F. Riano, Ph.D. Student Dissertation title: "Empirical Assessment of Distribution Channel Cybersecurity Footprint for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses in the Last-Mile Logistics Industry" lr336 AT mynsu.nova.edu |
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Dariusz Witko, Ph.D. Student Dissertation title: "Empirical Assessment of Cybersecurity Competencies Through Human-Guided Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)" dw1272 AT mynsu.nova.edu |
Past Interns/Undergraduate Students/Graduate and Projects
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Emily Africk, Undergraduate Intern (2018-2021) Project title: "An examination of historic data breach incidents: What cybersecurity big data visualization and analytics can tell us?" |
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Oriana Ricci, Graduate Assistant & Student - MS in Cybersecurity Management (2021-2023) Project title: "CyberSecurity, Professional training, And Research in Computing (CyberSPARC) at NSU" (DoD Funded) |
Alumni and Past Projects
Updated: February 28, 2025.