The Economics of Online Crime

摘要

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, conilict, 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).