About the Symposium on eCrime Research

The Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (APWG eCrime) was founded in 2006 as the eCrime Researchers Summit, conceived by APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy as a comprehensive venue to present basic and applied research into electronic crime and engaging every aspect of its evolution – as well as technologies and techniques for cybercrime detection, response, forensics and prevention.

Since then, what had been initially a technology focused conference has incrementally expanded its focus to cover behavioral, social, economic, and legal / policy dimensions as well as technical aspects of cybercrime, following the interests of our correspondent investigators, the symposium’s managers as well as the APWG’s own directors and steering committee members. Scores upon scores of papers exploring these dimensions of cybercrime at APWG eCrime have been published by the IEEE <https://ecrimeresearch.org/ecrime-research-papers/> as well as by Taylor & Francis and the Association of Computing Machinery (in the very earliest years of the symposium).

With its multi-disciplinary approach, APWG eCrime every year brings together the most heterogeneous community of counter-eCrime researchers and industrial stakeholders to confer over the latest research, and to foster collaborations between the leading investigators in this still nascent field of cybercrime studies. The power of that community, over the years, has been expressed in their contributions to research in academia and industry, cited in the papers above, their innovations for industry – and the globally scaled research projects they’ve organizing today such as the Cyber Resilience Baselining survey that APWG ecrime-associated investigators are organizing in Australia: https://ecrimeresearch.org/ncrb/

The breadth of the collaborative community that eCrime organizes can be seen at a glance in the symposium’s managers and reviewers, listed here as organizers of the 2019 symposium:

2020 Organizing Committee

General Chair:
Gianluca Stringhini, Boston University

Program Chairs:
Alice Hutchings, University of Cambridge
Markus Jakobsson, ZapFraud

A Short History of APWG eCrime

Academic and industrial researchers appeared at the APWG’s door almost at the very genesis of the APWG, delineating phishing’s contemporary nature, speculating on probable evolutionary trajectories – and proposing research that needed APWG’s data corpora to shape their theses and inform their research. The APWG established APWG eCrime to honor that contribution, foster its spirit – and to organize the creative energy of researchers that would eventually overwhelm the APWG’s other conference venues.

APWG organized the initial eCrime Researchers Summit in Orlando in early Spring 2006 in collaboration with Florida State University; the National Center for Forensic Sciences at University of Central Florida; and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, recognizing the interest in ecrime research by both researchers and within the law enforcement community. Secretary General Cassidy authored the initial CFP. FSU computer science researcher Judi Mulholland organized and managed the peer-review committee and edited the proceedings for publication by Taylor & Francis.

Since the first eCrime conference in 2006, the APWG eCrime management team and submission review committee – drawing from academic and industrial researchers from across the world – has produced conference with academic conference partners every year. Today, APWG eCrime is supported by the IEEE Standards Association which acts as Technical Sponsor to the conference and publishes the conferences proceedings in the IEEE XPlore Digital Library.

APWG eCrime will continue to be a collaborative project of its sponsoring institutions, its chairs, committee members, reviewers, and, of course, the researchers who share their findings. The APWG gives its thanks to all who are making eCrime the keystone event in the field and to all of those who have helped establish and maintain it. And to all of our new collaborators and contributors: welcome. If you’ve an interest in participating somehow in development this vital program, please contact admin [at] apwg.org.