Overview

Today's world's societies are becoming more and more dependent on open networks such as the Internet - where commercial activities, business transactions and government services are realized. This has led to the fast development of new cyber threats and numerous information security issues which are exploited by cyber criminals. The inability to provide trusted secure services in contemporary computer network technologies has a tremendous socio-economic impact on global enterprises as well as individuals.

Moreover, the frequently occurring international frauds impose the necessity to conduct the investigation of facts spanning across multiple international borders. Such examination is often subject to different jurisdictions and legal systems. A good illustration of the above being the Internet, which has made it easier to perpetrate traditional crimes. It has acted as an alternate avenue for the criminals to conduct their activities, and launch attacks with relative anonymity. The increased complexity of the communications and the networking infrastructure is making investigation of the crimes difficult. Traces of illegal digital activities are often buried in large volumes of data, which are hard to inspect with the aim of detecting offences and collecting evidence. Nowadays, the digital crime scene functions like any other network, with dedicated administrators functioning as the first responders.
This poses new challenges for law enforcement policies and forces the computer societies to utilize digital forensics to combat the increasing number of cybercrimes. Forensic professionals must be fully prepared in order to be able to provide court admissible evidence. To make these goals achievable, forensic techniques should keep pace with new technologies

The aim of this special issue is to bring together the research accomplishments provided by the researchers from academia and the industry. The other goal is to show the latest research results in the field of digital forensics and to present the development of tools and techniques which assist the investigation process of potentially illegal cyber activity. We encourage prospective authors to submit related distinguished research papers on the subject of both: theoretical approaches and practical case reviews.

This special issue presents some of the most relevant ongoing research in cyber crime. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:
• Cyber crimes: evolution, new trends and detection/prevention
• Cyber crime related investigations
• Network forensics: tools and applications, case studies and best practices
• Privacy issues in network forensics
• Social networking forensics
• Network traffic analysis, traceback and attribution
• Network incidents response, investigation and evidence handling
• Identification, authentication and collection of digital evidence in networking environment
• Anti-forensic techniques and methods
• Stealthiness improving techniques: information hiding, steganography/steganalysis and covert/subliminal channels
• Watermarking and intellectual property theft
• Network anomalies detection

Proposed special issue will serve as a platform to expose a range of approaches to the cybercrime problem, set out a variety of relationships between policy and the communication networks, and set the stage for further research towards normative and theoretical discourse around the constantly moving target that is cybercrime.
Besides normal submissions, the selected best papers of the IWCC 2015 (International Workshop on Cyber Crime) are invited to this special issue. There should be at least 70% difference between the extended/revised paper and workshop paper.

Guest Editors:
Wojciech Mazurczyk, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
Krzysztof Szczypiorski, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland
Zoran Duric, George Mason University, USA
Dengpan Ye, Wuhan University, China

Important Dates:
- Manuscript submission: 20th October 2015
- Acceptance/rejection notification: 1 January 2016
- Expected publication: 2016

Instructions for Authors

Original and high quality contributions that are not currently under review by other journals or peer-reviewed conferences are sought. The submitted papers should be formatted according to the journal style. For more detailed information concerning the requirements for submission, please refer to the journal homepage and Instructions for Authors section at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291939-0122/homepage/ForAuthors.html

All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted to SCN through the online submission system available at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/scn. During the submission process authors should identify that the paper is for the special issue “Cyber Crime” (SCN-SI-088).

All papers will be rigorously reviewed based on their originality, high scientific quality, organization, clarity of writing, conclusions and relevance to this Special Issue. The manuscripts will be accepted or rejected in line with the usual standards of SCN.