Paper prepared for the 7th ECPR General Conference, Section 55: Transnational Organised Crime in a Globalised World Governance, Organised Crime, Security, Terrorism, Panel 392: Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism: Different Peas, Same Pod? France, Bordeaux, 4 - 7 September 2013

Proceedings of SecATM 2013

Research proposal, in Proceedings of Usenix LEET 2013. PDF

In Proceedings of Usenix CSET 2013.

Poster at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy 2013.

Proceedings of IEEE S&P 2013 International Workshop on Cyber Crime.

In this new discussion paper series, the Prague SECONOMICS team intends to allow the broader academic community taking part in an on-going discussion about risks and threats as well as trade-offs between them and security. This research focus stems from the fact that until now, social scientists have primarily studied threats and risks through the perspective of social psychology by conducting the so-called “risk assessment” analyses, especially looking at the concept of “risk perception”. This research thus aims to probe these concepts in order to broaden our

Vulnerability studies usually rely on the NVD or ‘proof-of-concept’ exploits databases (Exploit-db, or OSVDB), while the individual vulnerability risk is measured by its CVSS score. A key issue is whether reported and evaluated vulnerabilities have been actually exploited in the wild, and whether the risk score do match the risk of actual exploitation. We compare the NVD dataset with two additional datasets, the EDBfor the white market of vulnerabilities, and the EKITS for the exploits traded in the black market. We benchmark them against Symantec’s threat explorer dataset (SYM) of actual

This study investigates the effects of incentive and deterrence strategies that might turn a security researcher into a malware writer, or vice versa. By using a simple game theoretic model, we illustrate how hackers maximize their expected utility. Furthermore, our simulation models show how hackers’ malicious activities are affected by changes in strategies employed by defenders. Our results indicate that, despite the manipulation of strategies, average-skilled hackers have incentives to participate in malicious activities, whereas highly skilled hackers who have

This study investigates the eects of incentive and deterrence strategies that might turn a security researcher into a malware writer, or vice versa. By using a simple game theoretic model, we illustrate how hackers maximize their expected utility. Furthermore, our simulation models show how hackers' malicious activities are aected by changes in strategies employed by defenders. Our results indicate that, despite the manipulation of strategies, average-skilled hackers have incentives to participate in malicious activities, whereas highly skilled hackers who have high probability of