CPS 49: The Global Commons
Cooperation and Conflict on the Internet
home calendar topics reading work resources

Interent Malware and Information Security

Information Security Economics

Internet security can be viewed as an economic problem. In particular, a clean and sanitary Internet relies on cooperation among individuals and organizations to close security holes and police malicious activity. But security is not free, and the costs of insecurity are often paid by someone else. Our discussion draws on materials from the following sources:

Malware: Spyware and Botnets

To understand the nature of the threats, we discuss material from two papers: In class I showed some animations of malware epidemics from CAIDA, and also some slides from Geoff Voelker et. al.'s original work on tools to study Internet malware activity. I also used slides from the authors of the papers above, and some slides from the work by Dina Kitabi and Srikanth Kandula at MIT: they have a page on botnets with some related popular articles.