TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives

这个项目处理互联网安全的社会和经济因素：攻击者、防御者和用户的动机和相互作用如何塑造我们所面临的威胁，它们如何随着时间的推移而演变，以及如何最好地解决它们。虽然安全是一种由计算机和网络的技术工作所调解的现象，但它最终是一种由经济和社会问题驱动的冲突，值得进行相应程度的审查。如今的网络攻击者通常都是逐利的，将他们联系在一起的隐性社交网络在促进网络犯罪市场的创新和效率方面发挥着关键作用。此外，社会经济视角不仅可以为理解攻击者，也可以为受害者提供至关重要的见解。今天的消费者、公司和政府在安全技术上进行了大量投资，却很少了解其最终的投资回报。我们轻易地采用在线角色和人际关系创造了一个集体盲点，攻击者很容易利用这个盲点。解决这些社会经济方面的问题对于实现安全的未来信息基础设施至关重要，而对这些问题的正确理解需要基于经验主义的研究。因此，该项目有四个关键组成部分：(1)对一系列网络犯罪活动进行深入的实证分析；(2)绘制出以在线社交网络为猎物的不断演变的攻击者生态系统，以及不安全在线行为本身被采纳和传播的程度；(3)研究这些犯罪分子之间的关系是如何建立、维持和演变的；(4)衡量当今安全干预措施的有效性，无论是在大用户层面还是在个人用户层面。在所有这些努力中，目的是确定干预措施可能最有效地破坏整个滥用和犯罪活动生态系统的瓶颈因素。因此，这项研究有可能通过破坏整个网络犯罪生态系统来极大地造福社会：通过战略干预破坏地下活动、基础设施和社会网络。这项工作还将创造大量的教育机会，包括本科和研究生教育，以及安全专业人员、执法部门、民事监管机构、法律学者和负责应对现代互联网威胁的专业人员的劳动力教育。

This project tackles the social and economic elements of Internet security: how the motivations and interactions of attackers, defenders, and users shape the threats we face, how they evolve over time, and how they can best be addressed. While security is a phenomenon mediated by the technical workings of computers and networks, it is ultimately a conflict driven by economic and social issues that merit a commensurate level of scrutiny. Today's online attackers are commonly profit-seeking, and the implicit social networks that link them together play a critical role in fostering the innovation and the efficiency underlying cybercrime markets. Further, the socio-economic lens can provide vital insights not only for understanding attackers, but victims too. Today's consumers, corporations, and governments make large investments in security technology with little understanding of their ultimate return-on-investment. And the ease with which we adopt online personas and relationships has created a collective blind spot that attackers exploit all-too-easily.Grappling with these socio-economic dimensions is of fundamental importance for achieving a secure future information infrastructure, and developing a sound understanding of them requires research grounded in empiricism. Accordingly, the project has four key components: (1) pursue in-depth empirical analyses of a range of online criminal activities; (2) map out the evolving attacker ecosystem that preys on online social networks, and the extent to which unsafe online behavior is itself adopted and transmitted; (3) study how relationships among these criminals are established, maintained, and evolve over time; and (4) measure the efficacy of today's security interventions, both in the large and at the level of individual users. Across all of these efforts, the aim is to identify bottleneck elements where interventions might most effectively undermine entire ecosystems of abusive and criminal activities. Consequently, this research has the potential to dramatically benefit society by undermining entire cybercrime ecosystems: disrupting underground activities, infrastructure, and social networks through strategic intervention. The work will also create numerous educational opportunities, including undergraduate and graduate education as well as workforce education for security professionals, law enforcement, civil regulatory agencies, and legal scholars and professionals tasked with countering modern Internet threats.