The Economics of Online Crime

[Howell, Paul]

At http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~tmoore/jep09.pdf

The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and
fast-moving discipline. This field was kick-started in 2001 by the
observation
that poorly aligned incentives explain the failure of security systems
at
least as often as technical factors (Anderson, 2001). As distributed
computing
systems are assembled from machines controlled by principals with
divergent
interests, microeconomic analysis and game-theoretic analysis become
just as important
for dependability as protocol analysis or cryptanalysis. The economic
approach not only provides a more effective way of analyzing
straightforward
information-security problems such as privacy, spam, and phishing, but
also gives
insights to scholars of system dependability, conflict, and crime. An
annual Workshop
on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) was established in 2002.
The field now involves over 100 active researchers; the subject has
drawn together
security engineers, economists, and even lawyers and psychologists. For
a survey of
security economics in general, see Anderson and Moore (2006)

[...]


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