Intelligent Detection of Internet Threats and Human-Centric Security

Dear Colleagues,

The modern Internet ecosystem—comprising web applications, online services, cloud platforms and large-scale communication systems—has become a primary target of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Attackers leverage phishing campaigns, social engineering, software vulnerabilities, adversarial machine learning techniques and privacy leakage to compromise systems and manipulate users at scale. These threats are no longer purely technical; they exploit human behavior, cognitive biases and the intrinsic weaknesses of data-driven security models.

This Special Issue aims to provide a focused platform for research on intelligent detection, analysis and mitigation of Internet-scale cyber threats. It emphasizes AI-driven security mechanisms, human-centric threat modeling and privacy-aware defense strategies for Internet-facing systems. Particular attention is given to phishing attacks, user susceptibility analysis, software vulnerability discovery, adversarial examples in online services (e.g., speech and multimedia systems) and privacy risks arising from large-scale data collection and analytics.

The Special Issue seeks to bridge machine intelligence, human behavior analysis and practical Internet security systems, promoting deployable, scalable and explainable solutions that enhance the resilience and trustworthiness of modern Internet infrastructures.

This Special Issue invites original research articles and high-quality review papers covering, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Phishing attack detection using machine learning and deep learning
• User phishing susceptibility and risk profiling
• Human factors in cybersecurity and usable security design
• Automated software vulnerability detection and analysis
• Adversarial examples in speech, audio, and multimedia systems
• IoT and Cyber–Physical System Security

Prof. Dr. Lipeng Song
Dr. Mengli Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.