CLOSED: Call for Papers: Special Issue on Cybercrime and Online Harms

Publication: March/April 2025

Digital systems and technologies pervade all walks of life – from online banking and shopping through to social interactions and remote working. As society’s reliance on digital systems grows so do the risks emerging from misuse of such technologies to cause harms. These harms may be posed by cybercriminals aiming to scam and defraud citizens or to exploit personal and organizational data for financial gain or disrupting critical societal services. Or they may arise from abuse and misuse of digital technologies for a range of purposes such as spreading dis/misinformation, victimizing other users online, creating echo chambers or chilling effects, intimidation, harassment, hate speech and other online harms.

This special issue will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to addressing cybercrime and online harms including the tensions that arise between individual agency and personal freedoms and the need to protect the most vulnerable users online. We welcome original results that reflect the latest research progress in these areas, including technical issues, human factors, social science perspectives (such as criminology, economics, psychology, sociology and politics), policy, research ethics, and so on. We encourage and welcome data driven and computational approaches, qualitative research and case studies as well as all other scientific approaches and methods that domain experts consider sound and proper to answer the research questions posed. 

We seek submissions on all topics related to cybercrime and online harms. Topics of particular interest include:

• New and emerging harms including those from rapid advances in generative AI
• Impact of cybercrime and online harms on diverse populations especially marginalized and vulnerable groups
• Understanding cybercriminals (including behavioral studies, investigations of criminal communities and networks, and cybercrime measurement) 
• Sociotechnical approaches to mitigating cybercrime and online harms
• Digital forensics and attribution 
• Longitudinal studies of cybercrime and online harms
• Economics of cybercrime
• Cross country/culture studies
• Novel research methods 
• Research ethics pertaining to studies of cybercrime and online harms
• Policy-focused approaches

Submission Guidelines

For author information and submission criteria for full-papers, please visit the Author Information page. As stated there, full papers should be 4900 – 7200 words in length, with a maximum of 15 references. The writing style should be down-to-earth, practical, and original. Authors should not assume that the audience has specialized experience in a particular subfield. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere.

Please submit full papers through the ScholarOne system. When uploading your paper, select the appropriate special issue title under the category “Manuscript Type” and include complete contact information for all authors.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at sp2-25@computer.org.

• Jeff Yan, University of Southampton, UK
• Awais Rashid, University of Bristol, UK