Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
9.1
Journals
JCP
Special Issues
Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition
share announcement

Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition

A special issue of Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy (ISSN 2624-800X). This special issue belongs to the section "Security Engineering & Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 2637

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Mario Antunes

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic of Leiria, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: cyber security; digital forensics; cyberawareness; information security; cyber situational awareness; computer networking security; machine learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Carlos Rabadão

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Computer Science Engineering Department, Superior School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic of Leiria, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: information and networks security; information security management systems; security incident response systems for Industry 4.0; next generation networks and services; wireless networks
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are setting up the Special Issue on “Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition” in the Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy, which aims to attract original, pertinent, and innovative contributions on a wide set of topics related to cybersecurity, information security, and digital forensics. Information security and cybersecurity play a key role in the management of organizations in general, as they deal with the confidentiality, privacy, integrity, and availability of one of their most valuable resources: data and information. When a cyberattack takes place in the enterprise information system, the analysis and collection of digital artifacts is crucial to understand the origins, motivations, and impact of the malicious activities. To deal with the amount of assets being protected and their high variety and heterogeneity, organizations have adopted a wide set of techniques, tools, and methodologies to implement cybersecurity and digital forensics processes. The quality of these techniques and tools may dictate the speed and efficiency of the security of the assets, the improvement of availability of IT infrastructure, and, consequently, business continuity. The Special Issue “Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition” welcomes articles (reviews, communications, original studies, technical reports, and case reports) that focus on the various topics that are under the cybersecurity and digital forensic umbrella.

Prof. Dr. Mario Antunes
Prof. Dr. Carlos Rabadão
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. Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy 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 1200 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.

Keywords

  • information security
  • cybersecurity auditing
  • cybersecurity and information security compliance
  • cybersecurity governance and regulations
  • cyber situational awareness
  • digital forensics for cybersecurity
  • digital forensics incident response
  • digital forensics automation

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Related Special Issues

Published Papers (5 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

27 pages, 28194 KB  
Article
Tracking the Gaze of Secure Coders: Behavioral Insights into Attention, Transitions, and Training
by Daniel Davis and Feng Zhu
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2026, 6(2), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp6020075 - 20 Apr 2026
Viewed by 184
Abstract
Secure coding is essential, yet the strategies developers use to detect and mitigate flaws are not well understood. We present an eye-tracking-based approach that captures developers’ visual patterns while reading, coding, and applying security tools. Our framework uses participant-editable stimuli and dynamic environments [...] Read more.
Secure coding is essential, yet the strategies developers use to detect and mitigate flaws are not well understood. We present an eye-tracking-based approach that captures developers’ visual patterns while reading, coding, and applying security tools. Our framework uses participant-editable stimuli and dynamic environments to reflect authentic coding development. By visualizing gaze transitions and attention shifts, we expose how developers allocate effort during secure coding. By leveraging techniques that reveal gaze transitions, attention levels, and pupil size changes, we are able to gain insight into their behavior. Our study provides a fine-grained, process-oriented account of behavior in CWE-based secure coding educational tasks, uncovering attentional patterns and decision timelines that traditional methods may not capture. These contributions provide a foundation for improving training and understanding developer differences. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 275 KB  
Article
Deciding on Cybersecurity Awareness Initiatives: Insights from the Public Sector
by Joakim Kävrestad, Erik Bergström, Rebecca Gunnarsson, Ali Mazeh and Linus Stenlund
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2026, 6(2), 66; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp6020066 - 6 Apr 2026
Viewed by 434
Abstract
Raising cybersecurity awareness (CSA) of employees is crucial for all modern organisations. To meet the organisational need for CSA, activities aimed at increasing CSA have been the focus of both industry and research in the past. There are, subsequently, a plethora of CSA [...] Read more.
Raising cybersecurity awareness (CSA) of employees is crucial for all modern organisations. To meet the organisational need for CSA, activities aimed at increasing CSA have been the focus of both industry and research in the past. There are, subsequently, a plethora of CSA activities for organisations to choose from. Nevertheless, research consistently reports that organisations struggle to raise CSA to an appropriate level, and a core issue lies in their ability to select CSA activities and effectively adopt them. This paper used semi-structured interviews with practitioners working on CSA adoption in public-sector organisations to identify what practitioners perceive as success factors. The interviews were analysed through a socio-technical lens and resulted in a taxonomy that groups success factors for CSA adoption in the three socio-technical dimensions: organisational, user-centric, and technical. The taxonomy outlines ten success factors and demonstrates how the participants see success of CSA activities as not only dependent on technical factors but also, and perhaps even more important, user-adaptability and organisational readiness. The results were validated in a workshop with CSA experts across Europe, who highlighted the practical usefulness of the taxonomy as both a map of potential challenges and a teaching tool for educating new CSA practitioners. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 3346 KB  
Article
Hybrid-Pipeline-Based Detection and Classification of HTTP Slow Denial-of-Service Attacks Using Radial Basis Function Neural Networks
by Bashaer H. Alrashid, Mazen Alwadi and Qasem Abu Al-Haija
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2026, 6(2), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp6020064 - 2 Apr 2026
Viewed by 332
Abstract
Detecting denial of service traffic remains challenging when malicious sessions exhibit flow characteristics that closely resemble benign network behavior, particularly in low-rate attack settings. This study examines whether autoencoder-based feature compression can improve flow-based intrusion detection while maintaining a deployment-oriented design. We develop [...] Read more.
Detecting denial of service traffic remains challenging when malicious sessions exhibit flow characteristics that closely resemble benign network behavior, particularly in low-rate attack settings. This study examines whether autoencoder-based feature compression can improve flow-based intrusion detection while maintaining a deployment-oriented design. We develop a lightweight pipeline that learns a low-dimensional latent representation of tabular flow features using an autoencoder and performs classification using Random Forest, LightGBM, and a radial basis function neural network. Using the CICIDS 2017 dataset, the best performing configurations achieve 99.43 percent accuracy with autoencoder plus Random Forest and 99.39 percent with autoencoder plus LightGBM, while autoencoder plus radial basis function neural network achieves 98.27 percent, with consistently strong precision, recall, and F1-score. The findings support practice by showing that high detection performance can be achieved using compact learned features that reduce input complexity for downstream models, which is beneficial for operational monitoring environments. The study advances knowledge by providing a reproducible evaluation of representation learning as a feature compression step for tabular intrusion detection, and by linking model performance to measurable computational considerations relevant to real-world deployment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

34 pages, 4190 KB  
Article
Towards Effective Cybersecurity Governance: Jordan Compliance System and Self-Assessment Tools
by Iman Almomani, Shahed Mehdawi and Yazeed Allabadi
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2026, 6(2), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp6020060 - 1 Apr 2026
Viewed by 608
Abstract
Enforcing cybersecurity governance is no longer a choice. It has become essential to protect nations’ safety and economy. In addition to the well-known cybersecurity standards that provide guidelines for implementing security controls, many countries have introduced national cybersecurity frameworks to meet their requirements [...] Read more.
Enforcing cybersecurity governance is no longer a choice. It has become essential to protect nations’ safety and economy. In addition to the well-known cybersecurity standards that provide guidelines for implementing security controls, many countries have introduced national cybersecurity frameworks to meet their requirements and needs. These countries also provide assessment tools to check that organizations comply with these frameworks. This research emphasizes the importance of efficient cybersecurity governance practices, highlighting the Jordanian National Cyber Security Framework (JNCSF) that was announced in 2019. We have chosen this framework because, since its launch, it has not been presented or analyzed thoroughly by any of the existing studies. Moreover, the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) in Jordan has not announced any public self-assessment tools for organizations to evaluate their compliance with the JNCSF. Therefore, the absence of a structured and publicly available self-assessment mechanism for the JNCSF creates a challenge for organizations in objectively measuring their cybersecurity governance readiness. Accordingly, the main contributions of this paper are to provide a detailed breakdown and discussion of the JNCSF, which supports organizations in Jordan and also shares the JNCSF philosophy regionally and internationally. Additionally, this study introduces an efficient self-assessment tool (named JCCT) that can be used both offline and online. JCCT accurately measures the institution’s cybersecurity compliance against JNCSF and international standards (ISO and NIST), reflecting its current state and the potential impact on its risk profile. Moreover, this paper proposes new compliance score equations based on a comprehensive mathematical model that generally benefits any governance system. The JCCT tool offers rich, interactive, customized dashboards and automatically generates reports with recommended action plans for the organization. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 2858 KB  
Article
Generation of Distances Between Feature Vectors Derived from a Siamese Neural Network for Continuous Authentication
by Sergey Davydenko, Pavel Laptev and Evgeny Kostyuchenko
J. Cybersecur. Priv. 2026, 6(2), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp6020045 - 3 Mar 2026
Viewed by 444
Abstract
Continuous authentication is a promising method for protecting computer systems in the event of compromise of primary authentication factors, such as passwords or tokens. Systems employing continuous authentication that rely on biometrics may not be restricted to a single biometric characteristic; rather, they [...] Read more.
Continuous authentication is a promising method for protecting computer systems in the event of compromise of primary authentication factors, such as passwords or tokens. Systems employing continuous authentication that rely on biometrics may not be restricted to a single biometric characteristic; rather, they can simultaneously utilize multiple characteristics and subsequently arrive at a conclusive decision based on their collective analysis outcomes. One of the significant challenges researchers encounter when investigating effective fusion in decision-making is the lack of data. At present, data generation primarily involves the creation of feature vectors or attack simulation. This paper introduces a method for directly generating distances derived from a Siamese neural network, utilizing the probability density function of an existing distribution. Through statistical analysis, we successfully generated 5000 samples that correspond to the initial distribution, which were then employed to discover the threshold values at which FAR and FRR were less than 1%. The methods developed can be further applied to identify the most efficient strategies for integrating the results of continuous authentication in systems that incorporate multiple biometric characteristics. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cyber Security and Digital Forensics—3rd Edition)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-5
Back to TopTop