Our student Mario Gemov has made it to the final of the CAST IT Security Award 2025 for outstanding theses in the field of IT security. The topic of his bachelor's thesis was “Usability analysis of mail clients with regard to S/MIME.” The final round of the CAST Sponsorship Award, which offers prize money totaling up to €4,000, will take place on December 4, 2025, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt.

Two posters by and with SECUSO members involved will be presented at this year's DiTraRe Symposium 2025: The poster "Risks Posed by Wearables to Data Protection in Sports Science as Identified by User Studies" by Juraj Sikra presents a systematic literature review for the urgent novel topic of protecting sensitive data collected during sports science research with wearables. The poster for the paper "A Short Commentary On: 'Would John Dewey wear a Fitbit? A pragmatist analysis of self-tracking technologies’ impact on habit formation'" by Juraj Sikra, Diana Dimitrova, and Lea Sophie Singson presents the results of the work of three subject matter experts which followed an individual textual analysis and inter-subjective reflection methodology to write a commentary on a philosophical paper. The DiTraRe Symposium 2025 will take place December 2-3, 2025 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

On January 20, 2026, Prof. Melanie Volkamer will speak at the symposium "Update für Personalrätinnen und Personalräte" (Update for Staff Council Members), organized by the Bavarian Academy for Administrative Management, about security requirements for digital tools for Internet elections and voting. This topic is particularly relevant for staff representatives, who need to have an informed opinion on the subject of Internet elections and voting and to better understand which issues should be clarified with manufacturers of Internet voting systems before they are used.

The paper “The whos, whats, and whys of issues related to personal data and data protection in open-source projects on GitHub” by Anne Hennig, Lukas Schulte, Steffen Herbold, Oksana Kulyk, and Peter Mayer has been accepted for publication in the journal Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE). The paper examines how discussions on the topic of personal data and data protection are conducted on GitHub. A total of 652 issues from open source GitHub projects were analyzed. Most notably the authors observed a significant increase in reporting when GDPR came into effect, which indicates that data protection regulations effectively start discussions about privacy within the software development community.