PhD student position in Data-driven Cybersecurity

Por favor, lea detenidamente la información de esta oferta de empleo para entender exactamente qué se espera de los posibles candidatos.
Cybersecurity Group
Deadline for receipt of applications: August 14, 2026 23:59 AoE (15 August 2026, 13:59h)

IMDEA Networks Institute invites applications for research positions in the area of cybersecurity. The selected candidate will become a member of the Cybersecurity group led by Dr. Guillermo Suarez-Tangil.

The candidate will conduct cutting-edge research on how cybercrime is organized, coordinated, and sustained online, and on how it can be detected and disrupted. Cybercrime is a fundamentally collective enterprise: offenders rely on shared channels — underground forums, marketplaces, and increasingly private or encrypted platforms — to exchange tools, knowledge, and services. The objective of this position is to build an observatory of these ecosystems and to develop data-driven methods that make their activity legible: characterising how illicit practices emerge, stabilise,



and spread across platforms, communities, and languages, and turning those observations into early indicators of new threats [1-4].

A central challenge is that this environment is adversarial and non-stationary. Actors deliberately adapt how they communicate in order to evade scrutiny, and what they exchange shifts in meaning over time and across cultural and linguistic contexts. Methods trained on static, English-centric data degrade quickly once deployed. The research will therefore combine qualitative fieldwork with computational modelling to develop approaches that operate under uncertainty, adapt as the landscape changes, and generalise beyond the settings they were trained on — rather than relying on predefined dictionaries or fixed lists of known threats.

The position offers:

-
- Full-time paid position for up to 4 years, with competitive salary and benefits.
- Hands-on training in data-driv

📌 PhD student position in Data-driven Cybersecurity (Madrid)
🏢 Fundación Imdea Networks
📍 Madrid