Dr Hossein Abroshan

Hossein teaches and conducts research in the areas of cybersecurity, cyberpsychology and artificial intelligence.

[email protected]

Background

Hossein has accumulated over 30 years of professional and academic experience in diverse industries and universities. He has worked as a lecturer, researcher, chief information security officer, chief technical officer, and cyber security expert in the academic, research, banking, telecom, and manufacturing sectors. He has actively participated in technical work packages for EU-funded projects such as Horizon 2020. Hossein served as a member of the RDA-Group of European data experts (GEDE), the EUDAT work group on sensitive data, and the DDI Alliance. He has attended many research conferences and seminars and actively worked with European research communities.

Hossein has implemented and managed IT and OT security programs for several organisations using ISO/IEC 27001, NIST CSF, and ISA/IEC 62443. During his PhD and postdoctoral studies, Hossein researched the effects of human factors in cybersecurity, especially their impact on users' responses to phishing scams. He is a certified information security manager (CISM) and ISO27001 lead auditor.

Spoken Languages

• English
• Persian
• Norwegian

Research interests

• Cybersecurity and Cybercrime
• Human factors in cybersecurity
• Cyberpsychology
• Information security management
• IIoT (Industrial internet of things) and OT (Operational Technology) security
• Digital privacy
• Use of AI in cybersecurity (e.g., to detect and prevent cyber threats)

Areas of expertise

• Cybersecurity and Networking
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cyberpsychology

Areas of research supervision

Hossein is interested in supervising PhD students in the areas mentioned above under research interests, especially interdisciplinary research.

Teaching

• Cyber Security and AI Case Studies
• Principles of Data Mining and Machine Learning (Practical)

Qualifications

• PhD in Cyber Security (Business Economics), Ghent University, Belgium
• MBA (IT focused), Universidad San Juan DLC
• Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)
• ISO 27001 Lead Auditor (IRCA certified)
• Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), 2000
• Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), 2002
• Cisco Secure Firewall, 2002

Memberships, editorial boards

• Member of Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA)
• Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)A)
• Member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)A)
• Member of Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC)A)

Research grants, consultancy, knowledge exchange

• Domain Technical leader of a societal challenge of the Big Data Europe project (BDE)
• Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS) project
• Sensitive data in research e-infrastructures (EUDAT)
• Group of European data experts (GEDE) in RDA
• Council of European Social Science Data Archives research e-infrastructure (CESSDA PPP)
• Cyber security projects in maritime, manufacturing, telecom, and banking industries

Selected recent publications

Abroshan, H. 2021. A hybrid encryption solution to improve cloud computing security using symmetric and asymmetric cryptography algorithms. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 12.

Abroshan, H., Devos, J., Poels, G. & Laermans, E. Phishing Attacks Root Causes. 2018 Cham. Springer International Publishing, 187-202.

Abroshan, H., Devos, J., Poels, G. & Laermans, E. 2021. COVID-19 and Phishing: Effects of Human Emotions, Behavior, and Demographics on the Success of Phishing Attempts During the Pandemic. IEEE Access, 9, 121916-121929.

Abroshan, H., Devos, J., Poels, G. & Laermans E. 2021. Phishing happens beyond technology: The effects of human behaviours and demographics on each step of a phishing process. IEEE Access.

Abroshan, H., Devos, J., Poels, G. & Laermans, E. 2021. A phishing Mitigation Solution using Human Behaviour and Emotions that Influence the Success of Phishing Attacks. Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. Utrecht, Netherlands: Association for Computing Machinery.

Wittenburg, P., Hellström, M., Zwölf, C.M., Abroshan, H., Asmi, A., Di Bernardo, G., Couvreur, D., Gaizer, T., Holub, P., Hooft, R. and Häggström, I. 2017. Persistent identifiers: Consolidated assertions. Standard, Research Data Alliance; Zenodo: Geneva, Swissland.