IMF 2026 Call for Papers - Extended Deadline

[Janine Schneider]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to share that the submission deadline for the 15th International Conference on IT Security Incident Management & IT Forensics (IMF) has been extended.
The conference will be hosted at Fraunhofer FKIE in Bonn, Germany on September 15-16, 2026.

IMF provides an informal collaborative environment that brings together leading researchers, practitioners, industry, tool developers, academics, law enforcement, and other government bodies from around the globe to tackle current and emerging challenges in their fields.  Accepted papers will be published in the ACM DTRAP Journal as a Special Issue and will be Open Access. For further details, please visit https://www.imf-conference.org/.

Topics of interest include:

•     Incident management and the law
•     Incident management standardization, metrics, and life cycle
•     Incident management formats and protocols
•     Incident response and/or Vulnerability response workflows, procedures, and tools
•     Incident analysis including live analysis
•     Research in incident management and related processes
•     Development of tools supporting incident management processes
•     Sharing of data/information about threats, attacks, incidents, etc.
•     Setup of cyber defense entities including but not limited to: CSIRTs, PSIRTs, ISACs, SOCs, and any other organization specializing in (some) IT security incident management processes
•     Maturity of such cyber defense entities
•     Warning of large-scale communities about upcoming threats or detected vulnerabilities
•     Ensuring situational awareness and early warning
•     Mandatory vs. discretionary attack / incident / vulnerability reporting
•     Non-traditional incident management scenarios and approaches (such as IoT, OT, Industry 4.0)
•     Digital evidence, IT forensics and the law
•     Research and development of tools supporting digital forensics
•     Large-scale analytic approaches to forensics, including data collection, data mining, and large-scale visualization
•     Digital forensic laboratories and other organizations specializing in digital forensic science
•     Addressing forensic challenges of systems-on-a-chip
•     Anti-forensics and Counter-anti-forensics
•     Bridging the gap between analog and digital traces/evidence/investigators
•     Case studies and trend reports
•     Data hiding and discovery
•     Data recovery and reconstruction
•     Database forensics
•     Digital evidence storage and preservation
•     Event reconstruction methods and tools
•     Interpersonal communications and social network analysis
•     Malware and targeted attacks: analysis, attribution
•     Memory analysis
•     Mobile and embedded device forensics
•     Multimedia forensic analysis
•     Network and distributed system forensics
•     Non-traditional forensic scenarios and approaches (e.g. vehicles, control systems, and SCADA)
•     Storage forensics, including file system and Flash
•     Tool testing and development
•     Triage, prioritization, automation: efficiently processing large amounts of data in digital forensics
•     Typology of digital traces
•     Virtualized environment forensics, with specific attention to the cloud and virtual machine introspection
•     Forensics for attribution and prevention, comprising detection and reaction

Submission information:
IMF invites to submit full papers, presenting novel and mature research results, as well as practice papers, describing best practices, case studies, or lessons learned. The maximum paper length for full papers is 20 pages, including the bibliography and well-marked appendices. Short papers for reporting early research results or best practice approaches are limited to 10 pages. Poster submissions are also welcome.

Student scholarship program :
A limited number of scholarships (no registration fee, two hotel nights) may be awarded to students presenting a paper at the conference. The intent is to help alleviate the financial burden due to the cost of hotel expenses and conference registration.

Extended Deadlines:

•     Papers & Presentation/Panel Proposals: May 04, 2026 23:59 (UTC)
•     Posters: July 31, 2026
•     Author notification: July 10, 2026
•     Final draft papers due & presenter registration: July 31, 2026
•     Conference Dates: September 15, 2026 - September 16, 2026

We warmly invite you to submit your original research and to share this announcement with others who may be interested.

Best regards,
The IMF Organizing Committee