We congratulate Florian Moser on his appointment as a GI Junior Fellow for 2026! We are pleased that the German Informatics Society (GI) accepted our recommendation and appointed Florian Moser as one of five Junior Fellows. Florian’s research focuses on the security of online elections. He has collaborated with SECUSO on several joint projects and publications, including the paper "Development and Expert Evaluation of an Informative Video concerning Verifiable Internet Voting" by Tobias Hilt, Florian Moser, Philipp Matheis, and Melanie Volkamer, which won the Distinguished Paper Award at last year's International Conference for Electronic Voting (EVote ID 2025).

In a statement released by the Science Media Center Germany (SMC), Melanie Volkamer commented on the settlement reached in the lawsuit filed by several U.S. states against Meta. Among other things, the settlement includes that an age verification system must be implemented. Since the specific measures for age verification have not yet been clearly defined in the settlement, it is not possible to assess them in terms of effectiveness and data protection. However, according to Melanie Volkamer, a review of potential verification systems in the European context reveals that no satisfactory solution has yet emerged. She cites zero-knowledge proofs as a potential technical solution for age verification that complies with data protection regulations. The statement was prepared in collaboration with Yorick Last. Among others, the comments were featured in “Der Standard,” which reported on the case.

The paper "Stand der DMARC Umsetzung in deutschen Unternehmen" by Tobias Länge, Fabian Lucas Ballreich, Anne Hennig, Peter Mayer, and Melanie Volkamer has been accepted for publication in the journal "Datenschutz und Datensicherheit" (DuD) and will be published in issue 10. The paper examined the current status of DMARC implementation in Germany over a twelve-month period. The results show a remarkable increase in new DMARC records between May and June 2025, which may be caused by communications from the BSI as part of the "E-Mail Sicherheitsjahr". Since the proportion of domains that have not implemented DMARC or have implemented it inadequately remains very high, a notification campaign was launched targeting German companies and organizations without a DMARC record. A further increase was observed even after the campaign, indicating that the notification was effective.

The German OWASP Day 2026 takes place on 23 and 24 September – this year in Karlsruhe. It is the annual conference of the German OWASP chapter. OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) provides knowledge on security of software, among other things, and is probably best known to many for the OWASP Top 10. SECUSO team member Hanna Algedri will be attending the event this year and is looking forward to a wide range of exciting talks.