2025

A warm welcome to our new student assistant, Daniel Amemba, who will start in August 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!

Based on Noé's recently published paper, 'AI is from the devil' Behaviors and Concerns Toward Personal Data Sharing with LLM-based Conversational Agents, in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), he discusses different common use cases of conversational agents, the types of personal data users frequently share with them, and how this data can be used to influence users' opinions, and what risks are associated with these practices, in particular for society and democracy.

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

We are happy to welcome a potential future researcher. Prof. Verena Zimmermann gave birth to a little boy at the end of March and will be on (part-time) maternity leave until the end of summer 2025.