About the APWG
UNIFYING THE GLOBAL RESPONSE TO CYBERCRIME THROUGH DATA EXCHANGE, RESEARCH AND PUBLIC AWARENESS
Founded in 2003, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) is an international coalition of counter-cybercrime responders, forensic investigators, law enforcement agencies, technology companies, financial services firms, university researchers, NGOs and multilateral treaty organizations operating as a non-profit organization. Its directors, managers and research fellows advise national and sub-national governments as well as the United Nations (Office on Drugs and Crime) as recognized experts (as defined by the Doha Declaration of 2010 and Salvador Declaration of 2015) as well as multilateral bodies and organizations.
APWG, a not-for-profit industry association focused on eliminating the identity theft and frauds that result from the growing problem of phishing, crimeware, and e-mail spoofing, offers membership to financial institutions, online retailers, ISPs, solutions providers, the law enforcement community, government agencies, multilateral treaty organizations, and NGOs. Today, there are more than 2,300 enterprises worldwide participating in the APWG.
Operationally, the APWG conducts its core missions through: APWG, a US-based 501(c)6 organization; the APWG.EU, the institution’s European chapter established in Barcelona in 2013 as a non-profit research foundation incorporated in Spain and managed by an independent board; the APWG’s Applied Research secretariat; and the STOP. THINK. CONNECT. Messaging Convention, Inc., a US-based non-profit 501(c)3 corporation managing the development of the global STOP. THINK. CONNECT. cybersecurity awareness campaign..
APWG’s directors, managers and research fellows advise: national governments; global governance bodies such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, International Telecommunications Union and ICANN; hemispheric and global trade groups; and multilateral treaty organizations such as the European Commission, the G8 High Technology Crime Subgroup, Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Europol EC3 and the Organization of American States. APWG is a founding member of the steering group of the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative at the Commonwealth of Nations.
APWG‘s clearinghouses for cybercrime-related machine event data send more than a billion data elements per month outbound to APWG’s members to inform security applications, forensic routines and research programs, helping to protection millions of software clients and devices worldwide. APWG Engineering continues to work with APWG member data correspondents worldwide to develop new data resources.
The annual APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research, proceedings of which are published by the IEEE, attracts scores of papers from leading scientific investigators worldwide. The conference, founded in 2006 by APWG, is the only peer-reviewed conference dedicated exclusively to cybercrime studies.
APWG’s Applied Research and Development programs establish data assets, metrics and conventions that are deployed as permanent working counter-cybercrime resources, such as the APWG eCrime eXchange cybercrime event data clearinghouse; the education-page redirect program, and the STOP. THINK. CONNECT. cybersecurity awareness campaign.
APWG’s Applied Research Secretariat’s imperative is to develop and deploy universally applicable resources to inform and optimize the global cybercrime-suppression infrastructure in order to neutralize cybercrime programmatically. This organizing principle reflects the criterion by which its R&D programs are prioritized: their potential scale for suppressing cybercrimes in a public-health model of intervention.
The cybercrime research community converged on APWG after it established the Phishing URL Block List in 2004, providing investigators in academia and industry with a consistent, relevant data schema for phishing attack data with which they could inform analyses and experiments. Those researchers’ quickly moved APWG to found its peer-reviewed research conference, APWG eCrime. Over the years, the research community and APWG’s institutional cohorts have guided our R&D efforts, sometimes insisting the institution develop resources that are neither product, nor service but essential for the global management of contemporary and evolving cybercrime.
APWG‘s STOP. THINK. CONNECT. cybersecurity awareness campaign has officially engaged campaign curators from 26 nations, deploying STOP. THINK. CONNECT. through cabinet-level government ministries and national-scope NGOs.
Community-building conferences for cybercrime management professionals, government and law enforcement personnel and pioneering cybercrime researchers from across the globe.
Public education utilities for cybercrime prevention and data standards and policy development for cybercrime data exchange and programs for promotion of cybercrime research.
Correspondence:
APWG
PMB 246
405 Waltham Street
Lexington, MA 02142
USA