Botconf’13 is an international scientific conference aiming at bringing together academic, industrial, law enforcement and independent researchers working on issues related to the fight against botnets. The topics of interest include:

* The functioning of botnets and of methods used to distribute malware related to botnets,
* In particular, the functioning of malware and command & control mechanisms related to botnets,
* The understanding of the organisation of groups involved in the development or the management of botnets,
* Methods to monitor, localize and identify botnets and distribution of malware related to botnets,
* In particular, methods to detect, mitigate and disrupt botnet activities inside ISP networks or organisations’ networks
* Technical, legal and other methods used to mitigate, investigate, dismantle or disrupt botnets.

Botnets: “The term botnets is used to define networks of infected end-hosts, called bots, that are under the control of a human operator commonly known as the botmaster. While botnets recruit vulnerable machines using methods also utilized by other classes of malware (e.g., remotely exploiting software vulnerabilities, social engineering, etc.), their defining characteristic is the use of command and control (C&C) channels to connect bots to their botmasters.” (A multifaceted approach to understanding the botnet phenomenon, Moheeb Abu Rajab, Jay Zarfoss, Fabian Monrose, Andreas Terzis, in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement (IMC ’06))

The focus of the conference is mostly technical, but papers on legal issues as well as prevention initiatives are more than welcome. Whenever dealing with personal data, submissions are invited to include provisions in relation to privacy issues.

=== Submission guidelines ===

Authors are invited to submit research papers presenting original, previously unpublished work. The paper should be prepared according to the “Authors Instruction for LNCS” formatting guidelines (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html), preferably using LaTeX or otherwise Word.

Authors are allowed to submit both full length papers and presentation abstracts:

* Full length papers should have a minimum of 10 pages and a maximum of 16 pages main content (excluding bibliography and appendices). The language of the conference is English.

* Presentation abstracts should include a summary and a detailed plan of the proposed presentation. The length of those abstracts should be between 2 and 4 pages.

Submissions should be made at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=botconf13

=== Accepted papers ===

All accepted papers and presentations will be included in the programme of the conference, with time slots ranging from 30 to 60 minutes.

The programme and organising committees will consider requests from students whose papers are accepted for financial assistance in attending the conference (participation in the costs for travel and accommodation).

=== Programme committee ===

* Hendrik Adrian, CEO, KK KLJTECH, Tokyo, Japan
* José Araujo, Deputy Head of the Applied and Fundamental Research Division, French Network and Information Security Agency (ANSSI), France
* Domagoj Babic, Research Scientist, Facebook, Inc., United States of America
* Gilles Berger-Sabbatel, Chargé de recherches, CNRS, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, France
* Guillaume Bonfante, Assistant-Professor, Lorraine University, France
* Nicolas Brulez, Malware expert, Kaspersky Lab, France
* Alexandre Dulaunoy, Security Researcher, CIRCL, Computer Incident Response Center * Luxembourg, National CERT, Luxembourg
* Barry Irwin, Associate Professor, Rhodes University, Computer Science, South Africa
* Denis Laskov, CTA, Arcnet LTD, Israël
* Corrado Leita, Principal research engineer, Symantec, France
* Jean-Yves Marion, Professor, LORIA, Université de Lorraine, France
* David Naccache, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France
* Fred Raynal, CEO, Quarkslab, France
* Eric Freyssinet, Gendarmerie nationale (law enforcement) and Paris 6 University LIP6, France, programme committee chair

=== Conflict managements ===

Programme committee members are committed to avoid any conflicts when evaluating papers. Should outside reviewers be associated to the evaluation process, the same strict rules will apply.

Programme and organising committee members are allowed to submit papers for the conference, or take part in papers submitted to the conference. In such a case, those papers will be evaluated by non conflicting members of the programme committee and with equal chances.

The conference programme could include between 1 and 3 keynote speakers. They will not be submitted to the paper evaluation process, but will be selected to ensure the overall quality of the conference.