Hacktivated

After spending last summer at Cambridge University, Quincy Taylor was thrilled this semester when she learned Cambridge University has accepted her to their graduate program in Advanced Computer Science. A Cybersecurity major, Quincy’s journey started with a love for science. “I wanted to be a physicist from the time I was eight years old,” she said. Though originally from D.C., Quincy grew up in Provo. Before starting college, she volunteered at the BYU Girls’ Cybersecurity Camp and fell in love with the field. “It seemed to be a good combination of different things I was interested in,” she said.

Quincy’s Honors thesis research started at Cambridge. Through the Honors Direct Enrollment program at Pembroke College at Cambridge, she took courses in international law and relations. In addition, the program has a supervision option through which a post-grad PhD student was assigned to work with Quincy. Together, they designed a research experience that would eventually transition into her Honors thesis—in fact, he’s on the committee for her Honors thesis now.

Quincy decided to research a group of “hacktivists”—a term coined for “hacker activist.” These activist groups gain power through social media. “Hacktivists are hackers with a message,” Quincy said. Much of their power comes from how many people they can reach with their ideology; “hacktivists tend to have more bark than they do bite.”

It’s still a powerful bark. Hacktivists may not be the most powerful hackers on the world stage, but they have the power of influence. “Their power is less about the impact they make and more about who knows about the impact they make,” said Quincy. While cyber-crime research has been done on advanced persistent threats (APTs) and phishing scams, Quincy is part of a push to study hacktivist activities.

How exactly do hacktivists gain power? While at Cambridge University, Quincy decided on a specific research approach to shed light on their methods. “Last summer I learned a lot about a technique called topic modeling,” Quincy shared. “It’s a machine learning technique that lets us take a large amount of data and extract common topics that we can track.” Using a regression model, Quincy’s goal is to determine which topics and ideologies gain the most social media engagement for hacktivists.

Her research plan is an experiment with independent and dependent variables. “Likes, comments, replies, or forwards are dependent variables,” she said. “Independent variables include things like images, links from another platform, and the content of the message. Topic modeling is providing us some insight into the message content.” At Cambridge, Quincy did a topic model based on a hacktivist Twitter account. Her Honors thesis will continue her work with a Telegram chat. The end result will be “a framework for tracking these social media posts and helping to increase our understanding of hacktivist groups.”

Quincy has had to be careful about what details of her research she shares; hacktivists threaten cybersecurity and she wants to be cautious. “For my Honors thesis, I’m not including the specific group I’m tracking,” she said. “It’s been hard to exclude those specific details about the group, because so much of it is contextual [i.e., the history and progress of the group].”

Quincy gave three tips for those unfamiliar with cybersecurity. “Simple precautions are often enough to keep you pretty safe,” she said. First, increase the length of your passwords and don’t reuse them. Using a password manager can help with this. Second, be suspicious of claims online—don’t click on weird links and be aware of scams. Third, she said, “remain curious and ask lots of questions. Technology changes all the time, and nobody knows everything about technology and security because it evolves so fast.”

Quincy’s work isn’t all numbers: “this is a lot more qualitative than quantitative,” she said. She has found there’s an art to studying patterns in data. “My mom is an art historian, so I grew up in museums,” Quincy remembers. “[She] taught us how to read art…which is a language in and of itself.” In cybersecurity, Quincy is “essentially reading data all day, trying to turn data into intelligence…. Reading art teaches you how to read data and vice versa." She wrote about the similarities in her Honors 320 essay.

In fact, Quincy has a passion for the arts. “I enjoy reading naturalist writing and I love poetry,” she said. “I make block prints…I recently did a series of block prints of different birds for ‘The Music of Birds and Humans’ Honors class.” She also loves to travel (especially to France) and enjoys art history.

Quincy also wants to give back to the community that’s given so much to her. “I knew that my goal for my university experience was to get involved as much as possible and take advantage of everything BYU could offer me,” she said, “but at the same time recognize how much I could give back to BYU.” She has been involved in the Honors community, started the Cybersecurity Student Association at BYU, wrote grants to expand the cybersecurity camp, and started a cybersecurity symposium. Her advice is to get involved at BYU not just to receive, but to give.

Quincy works as a threat intelligence analyst for a defense contractor. She is excited to begin graduate school at Cambridge University in October where she will be completing a one-year Master's program in Advanced Computer Science.