2024 marks the end of an eventful year for SECUSO with many visits and changes in the team. Raphael Morisco joined us as a PostDoc and supervised the “Digital Transformation in Research (DiTrRe)” project, which started at the beginning of 2024. In October, we welcomed Prof. Karen Renaud as a visiting researcher and Bhavana Anna as a new member of our research group. In November and December, Prof. Filipo Sharevski visited the SECUSO research group to continue working on a joint paper on QR code phishing, among other things. We also welcomed numerous guests to our showroom, which we completed at the beginning of 2024. We were also active in the areas of research, teaching and knowledge transfer: a total of 18 scientific publications, particularly on the topics of online voting and phishing, were published this year, a press release on the 40th anniversary of the German e-mail was shared in numerous media, and at the AIK Symposium, which was organized by SECUSO this year, Philipp Matheis and Tobias Länge received the prize for the best thesis. As always, we have summarized all the information in our Christmas leaflet. We hope you enjoy reading it!

Christina Nissen, PhD fellow at the Department of Computer Science of IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark, will be accompanying the SECUSO research group as guest researcher from January to March, 2025. As part of her dissertation, Christina works on the security of online voting systems with focus on voter cohersion. During her research visit, she will collaborate with Tobias Hilt from the Research Group within the research project "Individual Verifiability in Remote Electronic Voting", and further work on the analysis of a current interview study. We are looking forward to the collaboration!

The article "The Past Decade of User Deception in Emails and Today's Email Clients' Susceptibility to Phishing Techniques" by Maxime Veit, Oliver Wiese, Fabian Ballreich, Melanie Volkamer, Douglas Engels, and Peter Mayer has been accepted for publication in the journal Computers & Security. The study identifies 23 deception techniques used by phishers in emails, identified through a systematic literature review of publications from the past ten years. Based on this, the susceptibility of current desktop and mobile email clients to these techniques is examined. The results show that all the tested recent email clients remain vulnerable to deception techniques from the past decade. The article also discusses communication problems between developers and researchers, along with suggestions for improving email clients.

On the afternoon of November 8, 2024, the 39th AIK Symposium took place at the Novotel Karlsruhe City. This year's symposium was organized by the SECUSO research group and was entitled “Security and Privacy made in Karlsruhe”. The symposium is organized once a year by the Verein Angewandte Informatik Karlsruhe e.V. (AIK). Interesting presentations from a scientific and corporate perspective, e.g. on the topics of “Privacy and Security in Crisis Situations” or “Psychology of IT Security”, formed the main part of the program. In addition, prizes were awarded to Mark Bohlender, Tobias Länge and Philipp Matheis for the best Bachelor's and Master's theses. All information about the speakers as well as interesting facts about the Institute for Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) at KIT are also available for reading.