2025

Welcome to all our visiting researchers! We want to welcome our three DAAD interns, Jeelka Hessenius, Luca Saur, and Adrian Brechtken, for three months from July to October 2025 from the German University of Osnabrück, and our master student, Justin Szczepanaik, for July and August 2025 from the Ruhr University of Bochum RUB, and our academic guests Rebecca Panskus to our group.  

A warm welcome to Marlene Wagner, who will start on August 1st as our new PhD student!

Verena Zimmermann and Nico Ebert have been interviewed for the May episode of the Security Awareness Insider Podcast. Together with Katja Dörlemann from Switch and Marcus Beyer from Swisscom they discussed what Security can learn from Safety (and the other way round) . 

Link to podcast episode: https://www.securityawarenessinsider.ch/

The article Beyond Deterrence: A Systematic Review of the Role of Autonomous Motivation in Organizational Security Behavior Studies by Xiaowei Chen, Lorin Schöni, Verena Distler and Verena Zimmermann that has been published at the ACM CHI 2025 Conference received an Honorable Mention Award.

Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713122

In May, Lorin Schöni presented two papers on phishing training at CHI’25 in Yokohama, Japan, titled “It’s a Match – Enhancing the Fit between Users and Phishing Training through Personalisation” and “Stop the Clock – Counteracting Bias Exploited by Attackers through an Interactive Augmented Reality Phishing Training.”

We would like to welcome Jens Opdenbusch from the Ruhr University Bochum as a guest researcher to our team!

The article "Fast jeder Zehnte nutzt die PIN 1234" that contains interview parts with Verena Zimmermann has been published by the Tagesanzeiger. Link: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/fast-jeder-zehnte-nutzt-die-pin-1234-267435884634

Four papers of the SPG group were accepted at this year's ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System that takes place in Yokohama, Japan. The conference is the premier outlet for human-computer interaction research.  

We are grateful for financial support from the Hasler Foundation to facilitate Noé Zufferey's project on peronal information interference and AI.  

Verena Zimmermann has been selected to serve on this year's program committee of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2025), a prime venue for human-centered cybersecurity research.