7th Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (WACCO 2025)

The emergence and commoditization of cyber-criminal activities calls for new empirical methods, measures, and technologies to quantify and understand offender operations across all forms of cyber-crime: from malware engineering and attack delivery, to running underground operations trading illegal goods such as drugs and illegal pornography, to spreading disinformation and planning (cyber-)terrorism operations. Without appropriate scientific measures of cyber-offender and attacker operations, capabilities, and resources, it remains impossible to derive sound policies, strategies and technologies that appropriately address realistic and evidence-based attacker and offender models. WACCO calls for all contributions aiming at providing methods, measures, metrics, and technologies or tools to quantitatively or qualitatively evaluate cyber-offenders and attackers from technical and non-technical angles. The workshop invites contributions from, but not limited to, the fields of computer science and computer security, criminology, psychology, law, and economics addressing this issue.

WACCO welcomes (full and short) paper submissions, for publication in the EuroSP IEEE proceedings and presentation at WACCO, and Research talks, for presentation at WACCO (no proceedings). All submissions will go through the same review process, and receive feedback from the PC.  

Submission Guidelines

WACCO encourages submission of full papers and position papers from academia, industry, and government for appearance in the EuroSP IEEE proceedings. They should present interesting results for both theory and experimentation in the area of attacker and cyber-crime operations. We also particularly welcome independent reproduction of previous studies or experiments or negative results. We expect full papers to be of 10 pages in length (IEEE Format). Longer papers that document extensive experimentation are full in scope (which could be described in annex of the main body of the paper). Position papers of around 4 pages in length should present new open and interesting questions that the community should address or open questions that past research papers have not yet addressed. We expect position papers to be presented in panels or poster-platform sessions.

Additionally, WACCO 2024 welcomes submissions of Research Talks. Research Talk submissions will go through the same review process as full/short papers and will be evaluated on the same criteria of quality, but will not appear in the IEEE proceedings. We especially encourage the submission of multidisciplinary work looking for feedback from qualified experts in the domain. Research Talk submissions can be in any format, and of length commensurate to the contribution. Indicatively, Research Talks submissions are expected to be in the range of 7000-8000 words. To keep review loads acceptable, submissions of more than 10000 words may be desk rejected. Research Talk submissions should clearly state “Research Talk” in the title of the submission.

Anonymous submissions

Papers should be fully anonymized before review: author names or affiliations may not appear or be revealed in the text. Previous work of the authors should be referred to the third person. In the unusual case that an anonymous reference is not possible, the authors should blind the reference (e.g. “[x] Blinded citation to preserve submission anonymity”). Papers that are not properly anonymized may be desk rejected.Submission of work that has been previously presented at conferences without proceedings, even if that work is associated with the names of the authors, or is published on online repositories such as ArXiv.org or SSRN, is allowed as long as the submission is fully anonymized. PC members that may recognize the work and its authors are asked to declare conflict on that paper and will not be assigned to it.

Submission webpage: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=wacco2025

List of Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Empirical studies on attacker operations and communities
• Novel methods to perform attacker measurements at scale across several communities
• Cooperation and trust as a source of attackers’ effectiveness
• Attackers’ skill set
• Attackers’ operational security
• Measuring the spread of false information campaigns on social media
• Quantitative and qualitative methods to measure, track, and counter cybercrime
• Cybercrime measurement and networks
• Cybercrime policy
• Economics of cybercrime
• Profiling of cybercriminals
• Security metric design and evaluation
• Security patch measurement
• Statistical exploration and prediction of security incidents
• Open Source INTelligence (OSINT) and digital footprints

Committees

Program Committee

• tba. See https://wacco-workshop.org/past/2024/index.html#organization for reference.

Organizing committee

Publication

All papers will be published by IEEE CS and posted on the IEEE digital libraries. All authors of accepted papers are expected to present their paper at the workshop.

Venue

The conference will be held in Venice, Italy on the 30th of June 2025. Further details: https://eurosp2025.ieee-security.org

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the organizing committee.