Important Dates

Publication: May/June 2025

Electronic surveillance and cyberattacks are used in occupied conflict regions by aggressors to monitor, cut off communications, intimidate, disrupt, or target [3]. Cyberatttacks are also levied across borders against countries, their populations, and institutions [4], as well as against the United Nations [5] and international, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) providing humanitarian aid [6,7,8,9]. And, attackers are known to take advantage of individuals in vulnerable situations following major natural disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires [10].  

This Special Issue of IEEE Security & Privacy on “Cybersecurity and Privacy in Global Conflict and Disaster Regions” solicits articles on topics related to the aforementioned situations, including threats, mitigations, policies, and future directions.

To better convey scope, a few examples of articles published in other venues that demonstrate desired scope of this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• Jessica McClearn and Rikke Bjerg Jensen, and Reem Talhouk. Othered, Silenced and Scapegoated: Understanding the Situated Security of Marginalised Populations in Lebanon.  Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 4625–4642, 2023.
• Dimitrios Serpanos and Theodoros Komninos. The Cyberwarfare in Ukraine. Computer, 55(7):88-91, IEEE, July 2022. 
• Martin Husák, Martin Laštovička, and Tomáš Plesník. 2022. Handling Internet Activism During the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Campus Network Perspective. Digital Threats: Research and Practice, 3(3):17, ACM, September 2022. 
• Kasra EdalatNejad, Wouter Lueks, Justinas Sukaitis, Vincent Graf Narbel, Massimo Marelli, Carmela Troncoso. Janus: Safe Biometric Deduplication for Humanitarian Aid Distribution. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2024.
• Rakesh Verma, Devin Crane, and Omprakash Gnawali. Phishing during and after disaster: Hurricane Harvey.  Proceedings of Resilience Week, pp. 88-94. 2018. 

Submitted articles should focus on facts and emphasize technical or scientific aspects (including human factors) of cybersecurity and privacy, or threats to cybersecurity and privacy,  in global conflict and disaster regions.  We encourage a broad and unbiased exploration and discussion of various threats, mitigations, and situations.

Pieces focusing on important topics such as social media, mis/disinformation and generative AI are only in scope insofar as those pieces tie strongly to cybersecurity and privacy.

Not in scope for this issue include articles that are opinion pieces or political in nature. 

When in doubt about scope, prospective authors should please recall traditional themes of cybersecurity and privacy conferences and journal venues. 

Submission Guidelines

For author information, including style guidance and formatting requirements, please visit the Author Information page. Full papers (5000-7000 words) and more technical pieces will be peer-reviewed, as is typical for IEEE Security & Privacy.  Shorter or less technical pieces (2000-4000 words) will be reviewed and managed internally by the Editorial Board.  Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. 

All pieces should initially be sent to spX-YY@computer.org for a determination by the Editorial Board on the article category and associated next steps.  Manuscripts that are determined best addressed via peer review will be redirected to submission via ManuscriptCentral.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at sp3-25@computer.org