eCrime 2025 inaugurates cyber-physical crime as a key research space for its 20th edition of eCrime, world’s only peer-reviewed publishing conference focusing exclusively on cybercrime
The 2025 Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2025) in San Diego on November 4-7 will examine essential factors for managing the impacts of the global cybercrime plexus to secure IT users, commercial enterprises, governments, critical infrastructure, and operational technologies. eCrime 2025 will be the 20th annual peer-reviewed, publishing symposium hosted by APWG.
This year, eCrime 2025 inaugurates a dimensional extension of the symposium’s purview to include research on cyber-physical crimes. From 2025 forward, eCrime will specifically solicit research on cybercrimes involving cyber-physical systems and operational technologies abused in the furtherance of any crime. This expands eCrime’s scope from purely cyber (digital) crimes to include those that manifest abuse against physical spaces, such as homes, commercial enterprises, scientific or military facilities, roadways, public spaces, critical infrastructure and devices (e.g. IoT, electro-mechanical controllers, sensors, etc.).
With the rise of cyber attacks inflicting physical damage – as exhibited in the Stuxnet attacks, the cyber incursions against the Ukrainian electrical grid a decade ago and the Colonial pipeline shutdown – as well as the rapid evolution of malware designed to manipulate SCADA and ICS process control technologies, it was clear eCrime’s CFP scope had to be expanded once more to maintain relevance to the contemporary cyber threatscape.
As ever, eCrime 2025, in its bifurcated format, will be presenting general session discussions from all stake-holding industries, research centers, and from counter-cybercrime experts from every discipline and sector: law enforcement. NGOs, and multilateral organizations – as well as spotlighting the accepted peer-reviewed papers of the 2025 edition of eCrime.
This year, eCrime is honored to be joined by the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on Security & Privacy. TCSP is standing as Technical Sponsor of eCrime 2025. APWG eCrime’s proceedings have been published by IEEE since 2008, under the aegis of IEEE Standards Association (SA). APWG eCrime looks forward to developing the symposium with the TCSP and the larger engineering community of IEEE. Still, APWG will always remember when Gil, Rob, Karen, Noelle, Steve, Christine, Rob and Jim stepped down from SA to invite us into the IEEE community and help us imagine the role of engineering in the global confrontation with cybercrime.
In addition, for the first time at eCrime, eCrime 2025will feature a pre-conference eCrime Training Day for researchers and industry practitioners. Trainers will have the opportunity to discuss their areas of expertise with attendees on Monday, November 3, the day before the conference proceedings begin on 4 November. These longer sessions are aimed at transferring skills and passing the torch to a new generation of researchers and practitioners.
Details for participation in general sessions, peer-reviewed submission sessions and the new training day programs follow below in the formal CFP. See you all in San Diego to explore new dimensions in the counter-cybercrime experience.
Call for Papers
This year’s edition of eCrime is titled “Cybercrimes Only AI and Crimebots Can Dream Of”. Beyond soliciting research into cybercrime that inflicts financial losses, as the symposium has since 2006, eCrime 2025’s chairs are particularly interested in papers that address challenges in: cyber-physical systems and operational technologies; artificial intelligence; and the interaction between different system layers (such as socio-technical systems) that are employed or abused by cybercriminals for profit – and for advancement of larger criminal enterprises.
Solicited Topics Consonant With eCrime 2025’s Theme Include:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) as criminal co-conspirator and defensive collaborator, such as:
- -> Malicious AI agents employed to perform enhanced malware polymorphism, agentic spearphishing, reconnaissance, etc.
- -> Development and maintenance of criminal co-pilots and the future of human-machine teaming, including hybridized human-crimebot cyber gangs.
- -> Are malicious AI tools lowering the skills barrier to commit more advanced cybercrimes?
- Adversarial AI (attacks directly against AIs and machine learning systems) as it relates to the furtherance of cybercrime or cyber-physical cybercrime — especially agents employed in security operations
- Defensive AI Agents deployed as cybersecurity operations managers and (autonomous and semi-autonomous) counter-cybercrime managers
- Design, deployment and assessment of multi-agent environments (MAEs) for enhancing resilience of infrastructure and systems to cybercrime
- Design, deployment and assessment of defences related to AI systems themselves (jailbreaks, injections, etc.)
- Actual, emerging or potential risks from AI systems deployed to animate cybercrimes against people, operational systems, IoT technologies, or physical spaces and objects
- Abuse of cyber-physical systems and operational technologies and downstream manipulation (extant, emerging or potential) for furtherance of crimes with physical manifestations, including:
- -> Drone and robot hijacking and weaponization;
- -> Criminal abuses and weaponization of medical and surgical systems;
- -> Criminal abuses and weaponization of IoT for domestic and commercial targeting;
- -> Criminal abuses and weaponization of autonomous vehicles and delivery robots
- AI and machine-learning system security to mitigate threats posed by advanced cybercriminal algorithms — and to guard against strategically misinforming and abusing them for criminal enterprises
- New research on policy, regulation, and law as they pertain to cybercrime of all types
Topics of general interest for submissions to eCrime 2025 are listed below, under the heading “Solicited Research Topics for APWG eCrime 2025.”
Important Dates (papers):
Full Paper registration / submission of full draft due: July 15st, 2025
Notification of acceptance: August 30th, 2025
Conference: November 4 – 7, 2025
Camera-ready paper due: November 30th, 2025
The selected peer-reviewed papers will be presented at the eCrime symposium along with panels and talks in General Sessions from other researchers selected from industrial and academic research centers correspondent with the APWG.
General Information
Crime sessions and proceedings are in English.
The San Diego venue and accommodation details will be confirmed by mid 2025.
Please contact the APWG eCrime organizers for any other details via email at apwg_events@apwg.org.
Discounts
Students requiring discounts should contact symposium managers at apwg_events@apwg.org
IEEE members and partners requiring discounts should contact symposium managers at apwg_events@apwg.org
Discount codes are also available for university researchers, government personnel and law enforcement professionals from pubic-sector agencies as well as for IEEE members. Please contact the APWG eCrime organizers for details via email at: apwg_events@apwg.org.
Solicited Research Topics for APWG eCrime 2025
Since 2006, APWG eCrime has cast its call for papers in relevant research disciplines, focusing in large part on financial crimes that abuse Internet technologies and IT to victimize users, enterprises and their brands. From 2025 forward, APWG eCrime is also specifically soliciting original research on cyber-physical systems and operational technologies abused in the furtherance of any crime, expanding eCrime’s scope from purely cyber (digital) crimes to include those that manifest abuse against physical spaces, such as homes, commercial enterprises, scientific or military facilities, roadways, public spaces, critical infrastructure and devices (e.g. IoT, electro-mechanical controllers, sensors, etc.).
eCrime’s curators define these cybercrimes as those that exploit, disrupt, or manipulate cyber-physical systems or operational technologies — systems that integrate control, feedback, and communication mechanisms across digital, mechanical, and biological domains.
The selected peer-reviewed papers will be presented at the eCrime symposium along with panels and talks in General Sessions from other researchers selected from industrial and academic research centers correspondent with the APWG.
eCrime’s curators define cyber-physical cybercrimes as those that exploit, disrupt, or manipulate cyber-physical systems or operational technologies — systems that integrate control, feedback, and communication mechanisms across digital, mechanical, and biological domains.
Alongside this expanded topic spectrum, eCrime 2025 is also soliciting papers that speak to the following topics and issues:
Economic foundations of: cybercrime cyber-physical crimes; and other abuses of IT for criminal enterprise
Behavioural and psychosocial aspects of cybercrime; and cyber-physical system victimization and prevention
Emerging technological exposures, vulnerabilities, and risks
Architectural vulnerabilities (of products, operational technologies, infrastructures and cyber-physical systems) that advantage criminal actors
New or improved techniques to detect and respond to cybercrime and cyber-physical crimes of all types
How to accurately measure and understand the health and resilience of systems, networks, infrastructures and users against cybercrime
Addressing challenges of cybercrime’s increasing complexity(e.g. digital infrastructures, crime-fighting/forensic techniques, and the structure of the crimes themselves)
Measuring and modelling of cybercrime/cyber-physical system crimes and related criminal enterprises for operational protection routines
Measuring and modelling of cybercrime/cyber-physical system crimes and related criminal enterprises for informing rational underwriting instrumentation developed by commercial insurers
Analysis and modelling of the cybercrime and abuse risk landscape
Cybercrime/cyber-physical system crime payload delivery strategies and countermeasures (e.g. spam, mobile apps, social engineering, etc.)
Application of public policy and law for the programmatic suppression of common cybercrimes; crimes against or involving cyber-physical systems and related abuses
Policy and legal challenges as they relate to actually developing and sustaining anti-cybercrime practices and policies
Cryptocurrency crimes and related cybercrimes, and the forensic tools and techniques required to measure, prevent, and counter these crimes
Case studies of current cybercrime/cyber-physical system attack methods (e.g. phishing, malware, rogue antivirus programs, pharming, ransomware, crimeware, botnets, and emerging techniques)
Detecting and preventing abuse of internet infrastructure to neutralize cybercrimes/cyber-physical system crimes and abuses
Detecting and isolating cybercriminal gangs and their money laundering routines and enterprises Cybercrime’s evolution in specific verticals (e.g. financial services, e-commerce, health and energy, etc.)
Cybercriminal cloaking techniques, and counter-cloaking tools and approaches
Design and evaluation of UI/UXs to neutralize fraud and enhance user security and cybercrime awareness
Novel methods for measuring cybercrime and related abuses for development of defensive routines and programs
Guidance for Authors
Submit papers here: https://ecrime2025.hotcrp.com eCrime has adopted the IEEE publication format. Submissions should be in English, in PDF format with all fonts embedded, and formatted using the IEEE conference template, which can be found at: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.
Submissions must include author names and affiliations, but should otherwise be anonymized. Authors’ own work should be referred to in the third person.
Papers should not exceed 12 letter-sized pages, excluding the bibliography and appendices. Committee members are not required to read appendices, so ensure that the main paper is intelligible without them.
Submitted papers that do not adhere to all the above guidelines may be rejected without consideration of their merits.
Authors of accepted papers must register for the event and present in person. Remote presentations delivered live and/or pre-recorded presentations will be considered in limited circumstances (e.g. where the lead author presents remotely and a co-author attends in person).
Authors will be asked to indicate whether they would like their submissions to be considered for the Best Student Paper Award. Any paper co-authored by a full-time student is eligible for this award.
Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. APWG eCrime understands that some authors may face difficulties in obtaining funding to attend the conference. Therefore, a limited number of stipends are available for those who are unable to secure funding. Students who will present their accepted papers themselves will be given priority in receiving this assistance.
Call for APWG eCrime Training Day Proposals
Are you an expert in a cybercrime research, cyber forensics or related investigation methods? Do you use a specialised resource/repository and want to show others how to use it too (or use it better)? Have you authored a new framework or modelling technique that you think more people should know about?
For the first time at eCrime 2025, APWG will feature a pre-conference eCrime Training Day for researchers and industry practitioners. Trainers will have the opportunity to discuss their areas of expertise with attendees on Monday, November 3, the day before the conference begins (on 4 November). These longer sessions are aimed at transferring skills and passing the torch to a new generation of researchers and practitioners.
Sessions could focus on a variety of relevant topics, such as:
How to collect, use, and analyse cybercrime data in investigations and/or research projects
How to investigate key data repositories, such as the DNS ecosystem, for research and investigations
New modelling methods for cyber threats, risks, and vulnerabilities
How to engage with policymakers as a cyber researcher or industry expert
An intro session for cybercrime researchers/investigators focusing on relevant security frameworks, standards, and best practices
Training session proposals should include:
Training session title
Trainer/artisan biographic description 3-6 sentences of direct relevance to topic space covered in the proposed session
Topic description of 3-6 sentences describing what the training session will cover and competencies it will cultivate
Audience: eCrime prefers sessions that any eCrime attendee could benefit from; however, please note if your session would especially benefit a specific audience (e.g. threat intelligence researcher)
Prerequisites:eCrime prefers training sessions that do not require any prerequisites; however, we may make an exception for a topic of particular merit or interest
Session lengthminimum of 1 hour, maximum of 3 hours. Please also indicate whether your session length is strict (i.e. if we receive many session proposals, or if a trainer drops out, would you be able to make your session longer or shorter)
Include all the information above in a Word or PDF document and upload to https://ecrime2025.hotcrp.com and title your submission with “PROPOSAL” followed by your session title (for example “PROPOSAL Using the OWASP model in SMEs”.)
A maximum of 4 training sessions will be offered.
Important Dates (eCrime Training Day proposals)
Deadline for Proposals: June 15st 2025
Notification of Acceptance: July 15st 2025
Anticipated time for each training session: 1 to 3 hours, with a preference for longer, in-depth sessions. If there is sufficient interest, we will consider running parallel sessions.
About the Symposium on Electronic Crime 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 in 2006 as a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary venue to present basic and applied research into electronic crime and engaging every aspect of its evolution – as well as spotlighting 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 and cyber-physical crime, following the interests of our correspondent investigators, the symposium’s managers as well as the APWG’s own directors and steering committee members.
Hundreds of papers exploring these dimensions of cybercrime at APWG eCrime have been published by the IEEE <APWG | 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 PhishFarm browser block list latency measurement program that APWG ecrime-associated investigators are organizing: https://ecrimeresearch23042.e.wpstage.net/phishfarm
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.
