Finger-waging researchers direct marketplace managers to maintain greater vigilance against obscured stalkerware applications in their inventories
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS / ACCESS Newswire / December 26, 2025 / The 2025 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2025) gave a research team from the University of Cambridge its Best Student Paper award for their pioneering examination of the stalkerware ecosystem that undergirds a vast, penetrating covert surveillance ecosystem.
The eCrime 2025 conference chairs also awarded its best student paper runner up to an international research team that examined the effects of a wide-ranging devastating take-down operation on one of the world’s largest ransomware platforms by law enforcement.
“Catch Me If You Scan: A Longitudinal Analysis of Stalkerware Evasion Tactics,” by principal author Anahitha Vijay and co-authors Luis A. Saavedra and Alice Hutchings of University of Cambridge took the Best Student Paper award on November 6 for its groundbreaking examination that documented “how stalkerware developers navigate and subvert marketplace platform governance,” thus illuminating their adaptive capabilities in order to inform development of more robust, future-proof detection and mitigation strategies.
The team’s winning paper concluded, “Given the ongoing risk to survivors, it is important for platform owners, such as Google, and security vendors to re-evaluate and innovate their approach to this challenge. Merely implementing store-level policies is not a sustainable solution, as our study demonstrates these strategies are systematically circumvented through shared tactics such as malicious compliance and feature stripping.”
`The Best Student Paper Runner Up award was given to principal author Ian Gray (New York University) and his co-authors Dalyapraz Manatova (Indiana University Bloomington), Kris Oosthoek (Delft University of Technology), Damon McCoy (New York University) for “From Lamborghinis to Ladas: Empirical Analysis of LockBit’s Business Operations.” The paper mounted an extensive, exploratory analysis of ransomeware-as-a-service platform Lockbit’s performance degradation after the Operation Cronos take-down in February and May of 2024.
“By eliminating vetting requirements and enabling immediate attack capabilities, the LockBit 4.0 program lowered barriers to entry, suggesting LockBit sought to mitigate diminished ransom revenues by expanding its affiliate base. However, the limited adoption panel underscores the constrained potential for revenue generation from signup fees alone,” Mr. Gray and his co-authors concluded.
About the Symposium on Electronic Crime Research
The Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (APWG eCrime) was founded in 2006 as the eCrime Researchers Summit, conceived by APWG Secretary General Peter Cassidy as a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary venue to present basic and applied research into electronic crime and engaging every aspect of its evolution – as well as spotlighting technologies and techniques for cybercrime detection, response, forensics and prevention.
Since then, what had been initially a technology focused conference has incrementally expanded its focus to cover behavioral, social, economic, and legal / policy dimensions as well as technical aspects of cybercrime, following the interests of our correspondent investigators, the symposium’s managers as well as the APWG’s own directors and steering committee members.
Scores upon scores of papers exploring these dimensions of cybercrime at APWG eCrime have been published by the IEEE <APWG | eCrime Research Papers> as well as by Taylor & Francis and the Association of Computing Machinery (in the very earliest years of the symposium).
With its multi-disciplinary approach, APWG eCrime every year brings together the most heterogeneous community of counter-eCrime researchers and industrial stakeholders to confer over the latest research, and to foster collaborations between the leading investigators in this still nascent field of cybercrime studies.
The power of that community, over the years, has been expressed in their contributions to research in academia and industry, cited in the papers above, their innovations for industry – and the globally scaled research projects they’ve organizing today such as the PhishFarm browser block list latency measurement program that APWG ecrime-associated investigators are organizing: http://ecrimeresearch.org/phishfarm
A Short History of APWG eCrime
Academic and industrial researchers appeared at the APWG’s door almost at the very genesis of the APWG, delineating phishing’s contemporary nature, speculating on probable evolutionary trajectories – and proposing research that needed APWG’s data corpora to shape their theses and inform their research. The APWG established APWG eCrime to honor that contribution, foster its spirit – and to organize the creative energy of researchers that would eventually overwhelm the APWG’s other conference venues.
APWG organized the initial eCrime Researchers Summit in Orlando in early Spring 2006 in collaboration with Florida State University; the National Center for Forensic Sciences at University of Central Florida; and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, recognizing the interest in ecrime research by both researchers and within the law enforcement community. Secretary General Cassidy authored the initial CFP. FSU computer science researcher Judi Mulholland organized and managed the peer-review committee and edited the proceedings for publication by Taylor & Francis.
Since the first eCrime conference in 2006, the APWG eCrime management team and submission review committee – drawing from academic and industrial researchers from across the world – has produced conference with academic conference partners every year. Today, APWG eCrime is supported by the IEEE Standards Association which acts as Technical Sponsor to the conference and publishes the conferences proceedings in the IEEE XPlore Digital Library.
APWG eCrime will continue to be a collaborative project of its sponsoring institutions, its chairs, committee members, reviewers, and, of course, the researchers who share their findings. The APWG gives its thanks to all who are making eCrime the keystone event in the field and to all of those who have helped establish and maintain it. And to all of our new collaborators and contributors: welcome. If you’ve an interest in participating somehow in development this vital program, please contact admin [at]apwg.org.
SOURCE: ANTI-PHISHING WORKING GROUP
