Prof. Melanie Volkamer was featured in the Deutschlandfunk Kultur program "Breitband". The program on digital elections was broadcast on March 1. The feasibility of electronic elections was discussed in light of the many late postal ballots for voters abroad in the Bundestag elections. Prof. Volkamer describes how end-to-end verifiable voting systems allow voters to track their own votes until they are counted. For voters, however, such procedures are complex and involve many steps. One question for research is how to motivate people to do this.

In the issue of February 26, 2025, Heise published an interview with Prof. Melanie Volkamer on phishing trends and protection measures in the corporate context. In the interview, Prof. Volkamer explains why classic phishing detection tips are reaching their limits and what users should look for instead. In addition to the growing role of AI, she discusses attack methods such as fraudulent messages via WhatsApp and CEO fraud. She also argues for a better security culture in companies - with meaningful training instead of questionable phishing tests.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reported on the SECUSO Privacy Friendly Apps (PFA) in its edition of Monday, February 24. The games in particular were praised for being free of advertising and user tracking. The Privacy Friendly Apps developed by the SECUSO research group only request the permissions required for functionality and do not contain any tracking mechanisms, meaning that no (usage) data is collected. All applications of the Privacy Friendly Apps group can therefore be installed without any concerns regarding privacy violations. The Privacy Friendly Apps are only available for Android devices and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or the F-Droid Store.

The proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2024) are now available online in the Digital Library of the German Informatics Society (GI) under the title “LNI-Band P359 - E-Vote-ID 2024”. A total of 16 contributions are included, two of which SECUSO was involved in. The aim of E-Vote-ID is to bring together e-voting specialists from academia, politics and industry to discuss various aspects of different forms of electronic voting. E-Vote-ID 2025 will take place this year from October 1 to 3 in Nancy, France.