We welcome Dr. Juraj Sikra, PhD as a new PostDoc in the SECUSO Team! Juraj received his doctorate in June 2025 at the University of Strathclyde StrathCyber Group (in assoc. with GCHQ’s NCSC) from improving cybercrime reporting in Scotland. Juraj’s original background is in clinical and criminal psychology as well as Human Resource Management (Learning and Development). During his PhD, Juraj employed a multidisciplinary approach to make viable recommendations for policy makers on how to influence the general population to report cybercrime. As a result, his research was covered by both national and international media. Within SECUSO, Juraj will be working on the protection of sport science data as well as with industry. Whilst he currently speaks only English and Slovakian, he looks forward to learning German and would be delighted to hear back from anyone interested in reaching out.

From May 26 to 28, 2025, a group of international scientists visited Karlsruhe to evaluate, among other things, the Topic Engineering Secure Systems (ESS). The guests came from ETH Zurich, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Leuven, among others. ESS is one of three (sub)topics in the Program Engineering Digital Futures (EDF) in the Helmholtz Research Field “Information.” We at SECUSO are involved in ESS as part of the Human and Societal Factors (HSF) research group. HSF presented the work of the research group in four demonstrators from the areas of security awareness, user authentication, legal design patterns, and securing democracies. Further information can be found in the special issue on Topic Engineering Secure Systems.

From June 22 to 27, Benjamin Berens will participate as an expert in the discussions at the Dagstuhl Seminar “Future of Human-Centered Privacy.” The seminar is dedicated to the interdisciplinary research field of human-centered privacy—at the intersection of data protection and human-computer interaction (HCI). Among other things, it will discuss how different user groups, including vulnerable individuals, perceive privacy, what concerns and expectations they have, and how they deal with data protection technologies. The discussion includes both emerging challenges – such as those posed by AI – and longstanding questions that need to be rethought in new contexts. The goal of the seminar is to develop a shared understanding of these topics, create a roadmap for future research in human-centered privacy, and foster new multidisciplinary collaborations. The seminar is organized by Zinaida Benenson, Simone Fischer-Hübner, Heather Richter Lipford, and William Seymour.

Two posters by and with SECUSO members involved will be presented at this year's 21st Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2025): The poster “A Framework for Developing Information Security Awareness Measures” by Mattia Mossano, Anne Hennig, Fabian Lukas Ballreich, Benjamin Maximilian Berens, Filipo Sharevski, Angela Martina Sasse, and Melanie Volkamer presents a work-in-progress framework for developing effective security awareness measures. The poster for the paper “Restricting the Link: Effects of Focused Attention and Time Delay on Phishing Warning Effectiveness” by Justin Patelka, Benjamin Berens, Carlo Sugatan, Melanie Volkamer, and Florian Schaub presents the results of a mixed-methods online experiment comparing the effectiveness of two methods for restricting links – “focused attention” and “time delay” – in reducing phishing click rates. SOUPS will take place August 10-12, 2025 in Seattle, WA, USA.