Rate My Professor Bill Mahoney

Bill Mahoney, Ph.D., serves as Professor and the Charles W. and Margre H. Durham Distinguished Professor in Cybersecurity in the School of Interdisciplinary Informatics within the College of Information Science & Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He acts as Principal Investigator for the Scholarship for Service program and advises NULLify, UNO's student-led computer security group focused on developing hacking skills. Throughout his career at UNO, Mahoney has earned multiple teaching honors, including the Nebraska-wide Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award in 2019, the university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, the Cheryl Prewett Diamond Alumni Professorship in 2014, and the Alumni Outstanding Teaching Award in 2008.

Mahoney's academic interests center on compilers, security in programming languages and design, software obfuscation, reverse engineering, and industrial control system security. His detailed research focuses include intermediate representation vulnerability analysis, software fingerprinting for intellectual property protection and executable steganography, anti-reverse engineering obfuscation techniques, and industrial control systems security involving CIP, EtherNet/IP protocols, PLC reverse engineering, SCADA applications in transportation and airports, and regulatory compliance modeling. He teaches courses such as Low Level Programming, Industrial Control Security, Host-based Vulnerability Discovery, Secure Embedded Systems, Operating Systems, and Compiler Construction. Mahoney has authored numerous publications, including the journal articles 'A Digital Forensic Analysis of An Electrocardiogram (ECG) Medical Device: A First Look' in WIREs Forensic Science (2024, with George Grispos and Frank Tursi), 'Cyber Pirates Ahoy! An Analysis of Cybersecurity Challenges in the Shipping Industry' in International Journal of Information Warfare (2022, with George Grispos), and conference papers such as 'The Forgotten Stub: Exploring Malicious Use of the PE DOS Header' at the 25th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (2026, with Sayonnha Mandal and Kshitiz Aryal), 'Deconstructing Dice and Destiny: Reverse Engineering for Deterministic Insights into a Probabilistic Game' at the 24th European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security (2025), and the book chapter 'Smart Grid Tamper Detection using Learned Event Patterns' (Springer, 2013). His contributions advance cybersecurity practices in vulnerability analysis, secure software development, and critical infrastructure protection.