The Internet and ICT are essential technologies for common-life activities, and it is obvious that having a resilient Internet infrastructure is critical for businesses, public bodies, and citizens. The “sustainability” term is usually applied in economic and environmental contexts, but it should not be limited to those obvious areas. With the current accelerated digitization of society, sustainability should also embrace technological environments and, especially, the Internet. Indeed, if the Internet turned out to be unsustainable, the world as we know it would experience catastrophic consequences. Thinking of the Internet as a global ecosystem, it is compelling to guarantee a sustainable development of Internet-based activities to protect the current highly digitized economies and societies.

Many threats must be considered for a sustainable development of the Internet. Among them, the explosion of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and ubiquitous broadband connections, including 5G telecommunications, are especially relevant. On the one hand, the IoT is leading to an unprecedented increase in the number of devices and connections. Furthermore, those devices are often lightweight, i.e., have very low computational, communication and energy capacities, and lack convenient designs in terms of security and privacy. On the other hand, 5G and other mobile communication technologies are bringing broadband connectivity to an almost unlimited number of devices, leading to an exponential growth in the infrastructure of the current Internet.

With such an explosion in the number (and heterogeneity) of devices and Internet connections, the threats to security and privacy for individuals and organizations are continuously growing. In addition, the existence of multiple legal environments and jurisdictions makes it difficult to develop global and effective solutions without taking an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach. Indeed, the protection of security and privacy of the modern global Internet ecosystem would not be possible only from a technological perspective but shall be combined with the views of other disciplines such as social sciences, criminology, and law.

This Special Issue aims at collecting previously unpublished, original, state-of--art research dealing with solutions, problems, defense mechanisms, regulatory issues, forensic issues, threat analysis, frameworks, and development of countermeasures for ensuring a secure and privacy-preserving Internet ecosystem, considering devices and users, in the current context of accelerated hyperdigitization of economies and societies.

This Conference Issue is being run in partnership with the European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference – EICC 2022, held in Barcelona, from 15th – 16th June 2022 (https://www.fvv.um.si/eicc2022/). While submissions are invited from all researchers, we particularly welcome full-length articles both from attendees and those that have submitted abstracts and posters for consideration at this conference.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Cybersecurity and cyber resilience for a sustainable internet
• Cybersecurity in IoT, big data and 5G scenarios
• Digital privacy in IoT, big data and 5G scenarios
• Cyber forensics in IoT, big data and 5G scenarios
• Digital currency, blockchains and cybercrime
• Law, investigation, internet jurisdiction and ethics
• Child safety in cyberspace
• Healthcare information security
• Surveillance, interception, blocking, and sovereignty
• Cyber warfare
• Sustainable security of critical infrastructure
• Sustainable security of embedded systems
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Sustainable governance of information security
• Sustainable security in cloud environments
• Sustainability security of software development