My student Yaiza Moyons Rodríguez disserted her Telematics BSc thesis

🎓 Outstanding Bachelor’s Thesis Defense

On Tuesday, July 21, 2026, my student Yaiza Moyons Rodríguez successfully defended her Bachelor’s Thesis titled “Distributed System for Analyzing Suspicious Links in Online Fraud” (“Sistema distribuido para el análisis de enlaces sospechosos en fraudes online”). Her work received an Outstanding (9.0/10) grade from the evaluation committee.

The project addresses the growing threat of digital fraud via text messages (smishing), which particularly affects technologically vulnerable user demographics. Yaiza designed and developed a lightweight, open-source, multiplatform web application that inspects the network infrastructure of suspicious links contained in SMS messages before users interact with them—without requiring any software installation on end-user devices.

Her core technical contribution is an automated heuristic engine written in Python that extracts network metadata in real time. The system evaluates multiple risk factors, including DNS records (A, MX, NS), SSL/TLS certificate age and issuers (identifying short-lived or automated CAs), RDAP domain creation dates, cross-identity verification against expected entities, and TLD reputational metrics to calculate a normalized risk score (0–100).

The system adopts a modular microservices architecture containerized with Docker, utilizing Streamlit for an intuitive, accessible frontend GUI, MongoDB for dynamic NoSQL metadata persistence, and external APIs for IP geolocation and RDAP lookups. Furthermore, the platform strictly complies with GDPR standards by ensuring no personal user data is stored.

Validation tests under real-world scenarios confirmed the accuracy of the heuristic engine in identifying fraudulent links, achieving fast response times averaging 4.15 seconds.

Yaiza’s project demonstrates how open-source technologies can be effectively harnessed to build accessible cybersecurity tools, directly contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 9, SDG 10, and SDG 16) by bridging the digital security gap and protecting vulnerable citizens.

This outstanding result reflects her technical maturity, dedication, and problem-solving skills, marking a solid step forward toward her professional career in telecommunications and cybersecurity.