A fundamental goal for a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) is to bridge the gap between research and practice for government customers. At the CERT Division of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), we've taken a step beyond that and decided that, in cybersecurity, we should be bridging the gap for all researchers and practitioners. To help achieve this goal, I decided that a journal would be an important step. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) agreed that that was a worthy goal and helped me create ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP) with my co-Editor-in-Chief, Arun Lakhotia of University of Louisiana, Lafayette and Cythereal.

I'm proud to announce the publication of our first issue. DTRAP partnered with the FIRST conference to present papers from the conference. The papers range from "SCA-Pitaya: A Practical and Affordable Side-Channel Attack Setup for Power Leakage--Based Evaluations" to "Fingerpointing False Positives: How to Better Integrate Continuous Improvement into Security Monitoring".

This issue is also open access, thanks to the FIRST organization. I'm very proud of this premier issue and hope to have many more issues in the future. For more information on submitting, check our author guidelines. I'm very interested in what practitioners have to say, which is why we have the Field Note paper submission option. The Field Note paper is a short 1000-1500 word paper that can be a case study, an observation, or an exploration of a new field. These should be a perspective on a single phenomenon that suggest new areas of research to researchers.

Please contact dtrap-edtors@acm.org if you have any questions.