Today’s world’s societies are becoming more and more dependent on online services – where commercial activities, business transactions and government services are realized. This tendency has been especially visible during the COVID-19 epidemy. As a consequence, it has led to the fast development of new cyber threats and numerous information security issues which are exploited by cyber criminals. The inability to provide trusted secure services in contemporary computer network technologies has a tremendous socio-economic impact on global enterprises as well as individuals.

Moreover, the frequently occurring international frauds impose the necessity to conduct the investigation of facts spanning across multiple domains and countries. Such examination is often subject to different jurisdictions and legal systems. A good illustration of the above being the Internet, which has made it easier to perpetrate traditional crimes. It has acted as an alternate avenue for the criminals to conduct their activities, and launch attacks with relative anonymity. The increased complexity of the communications and the networking infrastructure is making investigation of the crimes difficult. Traces of illegal digital activities are difficult to analyze due to large volumes of data. Nowadays, the digital crime scene functions like any other network, with dedicated administrators functioning as the first responders.

This poses new challenges for law enforcement policies and forces the computer societies to utilize digital forensics to combat the increasing number of cybercrimes. Forensic professionals must be fully prepared in order to be able to provide court admissible evidence. To make these goals achievable, forensic techniques should keep pace with new technologies.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together the research outcomes provided by the researchers from academia and the industry. The other goal is to show the latest research results in the field of digital forensics. We strongly encourage prospective authors to submit articles presenting both theoretical approaches and practical case reviews, including work-in-progress reports.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Big Data analytics helping to track cybercrimes
• Protecting Big Data against cybercrimes
• Crime-as-a-service
• Criminal abuse of clouds and social networks
• Criminal to criminal (C2C) communications
• Criminal to victim (C2V) communications
• Criminal use of IoT, e.g., IoT-based botnets
• Cybercrime related investigations
• Cybercrimes: evolution, new trends and detection
• Darknets and hidden services
• Mobile malware
• Network anomalies detection
• Network traffic analysis, traceback and attribution
• Incident response, investigation and evidence handling
• Novel techniques in exploit kits
• Political and business issues related to digital forensics and anti-forensic techniques
• Anti-forensic techniques and methods
• Identification, authentication and collection of digital evidence
• Integrity of digital evidence and live investigations
• Privacy issues in digital forensics
• Ransomware: evolution, functioning, types, etc.
• Steganography/steganalysis and covert/subliminal channels
• Novel applications of information hiding in networks
• Watermarking and intellectual property theft

Workshop Chairs
Artur Janicki, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
Krzysztof Szczypiorski, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland

Submission Guidelines
The submission guidelines valid for the workshop are the same as for the ARES conference. They can be found at https://www.ares-conference.eu/conference/submission/.