Viktoriia Astafieva
Viktoriia Astafieva in academic dress on the Mathematical Bridge, Cambridge

I’m a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and a member of St John’s College. My PhD is funded by a Martingale PhD Scholarship, and I work with Professor Alice Hutchings.

I study the cyber capabilities of AI agents. What they can do in attack and defence and how they are already used in cybercrime. My earlier research grew out of my MPhil thesis. I used domain adaptation to classify cybercrime content across languages on the Telegram underground.

I did my MPhil in Advanced Computer Science at Queens’ College as an Allianz Scholar and my BSc in Computer Science in Kyiv under a state scholarship, graduating from both with First Class Honours.

If you’d like to work together, reach out.

  • AI agents
  • Cybercrime
  • Security measurement
  • Adversarial ML
  • Multilingual NLP

News

  • Started my PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge as a member of St John’s College, funded by a Martingale PhD Scholarship.

  • Our paper Navigating the Seven Cs, with Tina Marjanov, Jack Hughes and Alice Hutchings, is in the TAKEDOWN workshop at ACM CCS 2026.

  • Finished the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science with First Class Honours.

  • Joined the Department of Computer Science and Technology as a research assistant, studying the Web Scraping as a Service ecosystem.

  • Started the MPhil at Queens’ College, Cambridge, as an Allianz Scholar.

Publications

  1. Navigating the Seven Cs: Challenges of Collecting Chat Channel Content of Cybercrime Communities

    Tina Marjanov, Jack Hughes, Viktoriia Astafieva, Alice Hutchings

    ACM CCS Workshop on Technical Analysis and Knowledge Exchange on Disrupting Online Criminal Networks (TAKEDOWN), 2026

    Cite
    @inproceedings{marjanov2026sevencs,
  title     = {Navigating the Seven Cs: Challenges of Collecting
               Chat Channel Content of Cybercrime Communities},
  author    = {Marjanov, Tina and Hughes, Jack and
               Astafieva, Viktoriia and Hutchings, Alice},
  booktitle = {ACM CCS Workshop on Technical Analysis and Knowledge
               Exchange on Disrupting Online Criminal Networks (TAKEDOWN)},
  year      = {2026}
}

Education

  1. PhD in Computer Science

    University of Cambridge · St John’s College

    Oct 2026 – presentCambridge, UK

    • Fully funded Martingale PhD Scholarship.
    • Research focus: cyber capabilities of AI agents, their security and cybercrime applications.

  2. MPhil (Hons) in Advanced Computer Science

    University of Cambridge · Queens’ College

    Oct 2025 – Jul 2026Cambridge, UK

    • First Class Honours. Awarded the Allianz Scholarship. Supervisors: Prof. Alice Hutchings and Dr Jack Hughes.
    • Dissertation: A Domain Adaptation Approach to Multilingual Cybercrime Classification on the Telegram Underground under Adversarial Evasion.

  3. BSc (Hons) in Computer Science

    State University of Trade and Economics

    Sep 2020 – Jul 2024Kyiv, Ukraine

    • First Class Honours; fully funded scholarship; top 5% of cohort.

Experience

  1. Research Assistant

    University of Cambridge · Department of Computer Science and Technology

    Jun 2026 – Sep 2026Cambridge, UK

    • Conducted empirical cybersecurity research on the Web Scraping as a Service (WaaS) ecosystem, investigating service architectures and abuse infrastructure.

  2. AI & Automation Specialist

    Diamond Link Services LLC

    Dec 2024 – Sep 2025Seattle, WA, USA (remote)

    • Designed a bespoke CRM with an integrated AI fraud detection layer over financial compliance cases.
    • Built transformer NER pipelines for entity extraction and risk scoring across due diligence documents.
    • Applied graph anomaly detection over counterparty transaction networks (PyTorch Geometric) to surface subtle fraud signals.
    • Automated compliance workflows via RPA: 13% efficiency gain and over 90% data accuracy across systems.

  3. Data Engineer / AI

    DealEstate.AI Enterprise

    Aug 2024 – Dec 2024Sunny Isles Beach, FL, USA (remote)

    • Built ML models over US real estate data to support portfolio optimisation and investment decisions.
    • Trained a pattern recognition model on financial documents: 85% reduction in manual entry and over 90% accuracy across systems.
    • Designed ETL pipelines and applied NLP to financial corpora, integrating outputs into downstream business workflows.

  4. ML Engineer / CTO

    Technical Electronic Medical Band (TEMB)

    Apr 2022 – Aug 2023Kyiv, Ukraine

    • Cofounded a MedTech startup; won a Ministry of Defence grant at the Innovative Defence Initiative hackathon (2022); selected as one of 12 startups for a VC speed dating session at the Centre for Business Research, Cambridge Judge Business School.
    • Led the full design of a smart medical token system, running structured interviews with military medics and field personnel to define evacuation requirements.
    • Designed a wearable smart token storing critical medical records for combat casualty retrieval, with prototype testing and iterative improvements for data reliability in field conditions.
    • Feature analysis across evacuation windows identified a compact subset of physiological indicators that raised survival probability by 35%, shaping the token’s storage schema.

Projects

Wearable token with an electronic medical card for casualty evacuation. Case study
Adaptive online learning with semantic grading and summarisation across languages. Case study
  • Federated Learning with Blockchain Audit Logging · Encode Hackathon, London, 2024
    Federated classifier (Flower) with tamper evident logging of model updates to resist attacks from malicious clients.
  • Rescue Team Allocation Bot · Nova Kakhovka dam disaster, June 2023
    Matched incoming requests to a live map of flooded areas and allocated rescue teams to zones.

Awards

  • 2026Martingale PhD Scholarship, University of Cambridge
  • 2025Allianz Scholarship for the MPhil, University of Cambridge
  • 2025Mentee of Prof. Igor Potapov, UK–Ukraine Academic Mentoring Scheme (Science for Ukraine / LinkUA)
  • 2020–24State Bachelor Degree Scholarship, State University of Trade and Economics
  • 2022Ministry of Defence grant, Innovative Defence Initiative hackathon, with TEMB
  • 2022Selected among 12 Ukrainian startups to pitch at Clare College, Cambridge
  • 2022Founder of the student journal Owl Treatise; Deputy Head of Student Council, Department of IT
  • 2021Ukrainian Tug of War Champion and Captain, University Women’s Team