IEEE Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (WACCO 2021)

Web site: https://wacco-workshop.org

Follow @waccoworkshop on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/waccoworkshop



The 3rd Workshop on Attackers and Cyber-Crime Operations (WACCO 2021) will be held jointly with the 6th 2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy as a virtual event.



The workshop welcomes mono-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary submissions on quantitative and qualitative analyses of cyber-crime operations; fully in scope to the workshop are contributions focusing on the networking, technical, criminological, psychological, economic, and law dimensions of cybercrime.



The full CfP and the workshop aim and motivation are listed below and on the website: https://wacco-workshop.org.



We are looking forward to receiving your submissions!



The WACCO organizers



**** Aim and motivation ****

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.



**** Call for Papers ****

WACCO 2021 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 network and computer security, criminology, psychology, law, and economics addressing this issue.



**** 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



**** Review model ****

Open reports: WACCO promotes an open and transparent review process. Reviews of accepted papers will be published together with the papers and archived in a public GitHub repository associated with WACCO. A link to that repository must be included in all accepted submissions. The reasons why WACCO implements an open report model are the following: 

- It documents why the paper was considered positively to contribute to the larger scientific domain it pertains to; 

- It provides a critique useful to better delineate research limitations and scope, which can be of particular benefit to young researchers and students alike; 

- It provides a structural incentive for reviewers to write constructive and clear reviews; 

- It provides a structural incentive for authors to implement reviewer recommendations for the camera-ready version of their paper; 

- It provides a critical viewpoint for future work and research follow-ups; 

- It provides additional transparency to the quality of the adopted review process and its outcomes. 



Early-reject and rebuttals:  Early rejections integrated with a rebuttal period have the combined benefit of: 1) providing quick, constructive feedback to early-stage work that needs substantial improvement before acceptance; 2) alleviating voluntarily workload from the PC; 3) implement a communication channel between reviewers and authors enabling fairer evaluations. The review cycle at WACCO is therefore divided in two phases:



- 1st phase: all submitted papers will receive at least two reviews; those for which the PC, after a discussion involving also the chairs, see no way forward will be given an early rejection notification together with the received reviews and a summary from the chairs on the reasons for the early rejection. 

- 2nd phase: all papers that are not early-rejected can optionally provide a rebuttal to address factual misunderstandings in the paper. The rebuttals will be read by the phase 1 reviewers, who can then modify or update their feedback, and will be in input to a third, new reviewer for an additional 2nd phase review. 



**** Submission ****

WACCO encourages submission of full papers and position papers from academia, industry, and government. 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.  



**** 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.



The submission site is: TBA (monitor www.wacco-workshop.org or Twitter announcement from @waccoworkshop)



**** Publications ****

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. 



**** Important Dates (all deadlines are AoE) ****

Paper submissions due: May 7, 2021 11:59 pm

Early reject notifications due: June 16, 2021

Rebuttal phase: June 16-18, 2021

Acceptance Notice to Authors: July 2, 2021

Publication-ready Papers Submitted: July 16, 2021

Virtual workshop: September 7, 2021

IEEE EuroS&P: September 6-10, 2021



**** Organizers ****

Luca Allodi, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands (l.allodi@tue.nl)

Alice Hutchings, Cambridge University, United Kingdom (alice.hutchings@cl.cam.ac.uk)

Sergio Pastrana, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain (spastran@inf.uc3m.es)



**** Program Committee ****

Maria Bada, University of Cambridge

Benoît Dupont, University of Montreal

Rutger Leukfeldt, NSCR

Rebekah Overdorf, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Sasha Romanosky, RAND

Gianluca Stringhini, Boston University

Gang Wang, University of Illinois

Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Dmitry Zhdanov, Georgia State University

Will Scott, University of Michigan

Carlos Gañán, Delft University of Technology

Tom Van Goethem, KU Leuven

Jorge Blasco Alís, Royal Holloway University of London

Ben Collier, University of Cambridge

Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, King's College London

Juan Tapiador, University Carlos III of Madrid

Daniel R. Thomas, University of Strathclyde

Giorgio Di Tizio, University of Trento

Veronica Valeros, Czech Technical University in Prague

Jonathan Lusthaus, Oxford University

Nick Nikiforakis, Stony Brook University