It's that time again: Today, February 7, is Safer Internet Day! Since 2004, this day has been used once a year to raise awareness of emerging online issues and current concerns. We took the day as an opportunity to publish the English version of our third NoPhish video. The video presents scenarios in which fraudsters exploit emotions such as stress, time pressure or excitement to steal user data or spread malware. The German version of the video premiered last year for Safer Internet Day.

The paper "Awareness, Intention, (In)Action: Individuals’ Reactions to Data Breaches" by Peter Mayer, Yixin Zou, Byron M. Lowens, Hunter A. Dyer, Khue Le, Florian Schaub, and Adam J. Aviv was accepted for publication in the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). The study is a follow-up to the USENIX paper "'Now I'm a bit angry:' Individuals' Awareness, Perception, and Responses to Data Breaches that Affected Them" from 2021. The main survey in which the authors presented participants with up to three breaches that affected them, was complemented with a follow-up survey in which the authors investigated whether the main study participants followed through with their intentions to act.

Changing your passwords regularly is a frequently encountered piece of advice. Especially today on "Change Your Password Day" it is again on many people's lips. The thought behind it seems understandable: First, if the password is changed regularly, it is harder to guess, and second, a password that has fallen into the wrong hands only benefits the attacker until the next time it is changed. But research shows that both recommendations stem from misconceptions: Regularly changed passwords are not harder to guess at all, and regularly changing passwords does not automatically lead to secure passwords. For "Change Your Password Day", we have summarized (well-known) background information.

On Thusday, January 26 2023, Dr. Peter Mayer presented the SECUSO Privacy Friendly Apps and the PFA mentorship program at the event "Open Source & Cybersecurity - Celebrating International Data Privacy Day 2023" which was organized by the Legal Hackers Luxembourg. At the end of October, some apps were taken out of the Google Play Store and the FDroid Store because the maintenance effort became too high. With the PFA mentorship program, interested parties can take on sponsorships for one or more apps, e.g. by assuming responsibility for further development or supporting the PFA team with human or financial resources.