Evaluating the risk reduction value of security products against mass market cyber crime

大众市场网络犯罪的目标是全球计算机系统的普通用户。这种类型的犯罪有许多不同的种类，如银行欺诈、假冒销售、信心欺诈、假冒反病毒勒索等，这取决于犯罪分子使用的货币化方案来获利。此类犯罪的一个几乎不变的特征是，在某些时候，网络犯罪分子需要妥协并控制属于毫无戒心的用户的计算机。在某些情况下，这些受损的机器只是用作犯罪的附属品，它们的所有者不会直接受到这些活动的影响。然而，在其他情况下，例如银行欺诈和网络勒索，受损机器的所有者可能会遭受重大的经济损失。

Mass-market cyber crime targets common users of computer systems worldwide. This type of crime exists in many different varieties, such as banking fraud, counterfeit sales, confidence fraud, fake anti-virus extortion, etc., depending on the monetizing scheme used by criminals to turn in a profit. An almost invariant characteristic of such crimes is that, at some point or other, cyber criminals need to compromise and take control of computers belonging to unsuspecting users. In certain cases, these compromised machines are only used as accessories to crime, and their owners are not directly impacted by these activities. However, in other cases such as banking fraud and cyber extortion, significant monetarily loss can be incurred by the owners of compromised machines. One of the mainstays of protection against this type of risk is the adoption of security solutions installed on these machines, such as commodity anti-virus or anti-malware products. The deployment and operation of such counter-measures have well-known direct costs, and somewhat well understood performance and usability disadvantages. However, there is much less reliable quantitative data describing how much value these products are providing in terms of risk reduction with respect to these threats. The aim of this research project is to develop methods to quantitatively evaluate the efficiency of such solutions at reducing the probability of compromise and the potential direct impacts of mass-market cybercriminal threats. In order to achieve this objective, we propose a combination of data collection and analysis approaches such as clinical trials with voluntary users, laboratory experiments under controlled conditions, and the use of other sources of macro-economical data on cyber crime.