Cybersecurity

New analysis, by a group of researchers including IGP's Michel van Eeten, suggests that by focusing mitigation efforts on a subset of ISPs could eliminate the bulk of zombie computers responsible for generating spam and initiating other online threats.
As reported in MIT Technology Review:

The researchers analyzed more than 63 billion unsolicited e-mail messages sent over a four-year period and found more than 138 million unique internet addresses linked to sending out the spam. Typically such machines have been hijacked by hackers and are corralled into a vast network of remote-controlled system known as a “botnet.”

As reported last week, the House Homeland Security Committee has passed a $2.7 billion appropriations bill, H.R. 4842 Homeland Security Science and Technology Authorization Act of 2010. The bill allocates $150 million over two years to the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate.

The bill continues the funding of Internet standards works dealing with securing critical Internet resources, as well as offers an opportunity for improving our understanding of how domestic efforts to improve cybersecurity impacts global Internet governance.

At the beginning of this year, a set of powerhouse organizations in cybersecurity (CSO Magazine, Deloitte, Carnegie Mellon's CERT program, and the U.S. Secret Service) released the results of a survey of 523 business and government executives, professionals and consultants in the ICT management field.

The media coverage generated by this survey provides an unusally clear illustration of how cyber security discourse has become willfully detached from facts. It shows clearly how there is an organized industrial and political imperative to drill into our heads the idea that the Internet is a dangerous thing and its threats are spiralling upwards at an uncontrollable rate. It doesn't matter what facts are uncovered, they are all interpreted to support this preconception.

With that intro, here is the lead sentence from the January 25 2010 Carnegie-Mellon University news release about the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey: “Cybercrime threats posed to targeted organizations are increasing faster than many organizations can combat them, according to the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey…”

Stop right there. A careful review of both the survey and the ensuing responses to it quickly reveals that that conclusion did NOT come from the survey itself, and was not supported by its data.

The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) has become the leading forum for interdisciplinary research into Internet security issues. The most innovative work of the past few years, such as this interesting report for the EU agency ENISA, has emerged from there. Our report for the OECD also...

The Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management has published a new article by IGP's Michel van Eeten and Johnannes Bauer, Emerging Threats to Internet Security: Incentives, Externalities and Policy Implications. The paper, based in part on numerous interviews conducted with network operators, is particularly useful for cutting through the often analytically empty cybersecurity dialogue. Using a marginal security (law enforcement) vs. precluded-event security (national security) framework, the authors identify why the issue of botnets leads to such controversy when it comes to policy responses.