Dalya Manatova
Postdoctoral Researcher, College of Computing and Informatics, UNC Charlotte
I study how adversarial, outlawed, and socio-technical communities organize, coordinate, persist, and adapt over time. My research combines network science, graph learning, discourse analysis, and organizational theory to model cybercrime ecosystems, ransomware operations, underground communities, and open-source software coordination.
I am especially interested in resilience, interdependence, specialization, and supply-chain structures in these communities.
Current Projects
Temporal Graphs of Open-Source Software Patch Review Workflows
Modeling patch review workflows, contributor/maintainer coordination and socio-technical dependencies in Linux kernel development.
Community Hiding from Graph Learning-Based Clustering
Studying how groups can evade or resist GNN-based community detection in attributed networks, with implications for group privacy, surveillance, and adversarial adaptation.
Ransomware Operations and Supply-Chain Simulation
Developing simulation models of ransomware operations to better understand cybercrime supply chains, task interdependencies, disruption, and operational recovery.
Organizational Anatomy of Cybercrime
Developing multilayer models of cybercrime organizational resilience by analyzing structure, specialization, rules and norms, shared goals, and relationship dynamics.
Selected Publications and Preprints
Manatova, D., McGrath, C., & Camp, L. J. In press. “The Organizational Anatomy of Cybercrime: A Multilayer Framework for Modeling Resilience.” Journal of Cybersecurity. https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyag014
Manatova, D., Moriano, P., & Camp, L. J. 2026. “Community Concealment from Unsupervised Graph Learning-Based Clustering.” arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12250
Manatova, D., DeVries, C., & Samtani, S. 2024. “Understand Your Shady Neighborhood: An Approach for Detecting and Investigating Hacker Communities.” Decision Support Systems.
Manatova, D., Camp, L. J., Fox, J. R., Kuebler, S., Shardakova, M. A., & Kouper, I. 2023. “An Argument for Linguistic Expertise in Cyberthreat Analysis: LOLSec in Russian Language eCrime Landscape.” IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops.
Manatova, D., Sharma, D., Samtani, S., & Camp, L. J. 2022. “Building and Testing a Network of Social Trust in an Underground Forum: Robust Connections and Overlapping Criminal Domains.” APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research.
Peer Review and Program Committee Service
Decision Support Systems
Journal reviewer.WEIS – Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
Program committee / reviewer.NDSS Workshop on AI Systems with Confidential Computing
Program committee / reviewer.
Contact
Email: dalya.manatova АТ charlotte ДОТ edu