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The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime:

Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper,we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major platform evolution, with the mobile phone replacing the PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing Windows, and with many services moving to the cloud.The use of social networks has become extremely widespread. The executive summary is that about half of all property crime, by volume and by value, is now online. We hypothesised in 2012 that this might be so; it is now established by multiple victimisation studies.Many cybercrime patterns appear to be fairly stable, but there are some interesting changes.Payment fraud, for example, has more than doubled in value but has fallen slightly as a proportion of payment value; the payment system has simply become bigger, and slightly more efficient. Several new cybercrimes are significant enough to mention, including business email compromise and crimes involving cryptocurrencies. The move to the cloud means that system misconfiguration may now be responsible for as many breaches as phishing. Some companies have suffered large losses as a side-effect of denial-of-service worms released by state actors, such as NotPetya; we have to take a view on whether they count as cybercrime.The infrastructure supporting cybercrime, such as botnets, continues to evolve, and specific crimes such as premium-rate phone scams have evolved some interesting variants. The over-all picture is the same as in 2012: traditional offences that are now technically ‘computercrimes’ such as tax and welfare fraud cost the typical citizen in the low hundreds of Euros/dollars a year; payment frauds and similar offences, where the modus operandi has been completely changed by computers, cost in the tens; while the new computer crimes cost in the tens of cents. Defending against the platforms used to support the latter two types of crime cost citizens in the tens of dollars. Our conclusions remain broadly the same as in 2012:it would be economically rational to spend less in anticipation of cybercrime (on antivirus, firewalls, etc.) and more on response. We are particularly bad at prosecuting criminals who operate infrastructure that other wrongdoers exploit. Given the growing realisation among policymakers that crime hasn’t been falling over the past decade, merely moving online, we might reasonably hope for better funded and coordinated law-enforcement action.

Richard Clayton gave a presentation on this yesterday at WEIS. His final slide contained a summary.

  • Payment fraud is up, but credit card sales are up even more — so we’re winning.

  • Cryptocurrencies are enabling new scams, but the big money is still being lost in more traditional investment fraud.

  • Telcom fraud is down, basically because Skype is free.

  • Anti-virus fraud has almost disappeared, but tech support scams are growing very rapidly.

  • The big money is still in tax fraud, welfare fraud, VAT fraud, and so on.

  • We spend more money on cyber defense than we do on the actual losses.

  • Criminals largely act with impunity. They don’t believe they will get caught, and mostly that’s correct.

Bottom line: the technology has changed a lot since 2012, but the economic considerations remain unchanged.

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June 4, 2019 academicpapers, cybercrime, cybersecurity, economicsofsecurity, fraud, Security technology Read more >

The Importance of Protecting Cybersecurity Whistleblowers

Interesting essay arguing that we need better legislation to protect cybersecurity whistleblowers.

Congress should act to protect cybersecurity whistleblowers because information security has never been so important, or so challenging. In the wake of a barrage of shocking revelations about data breaches and companies mishandling of customer data, a bipartisan consensus has emerged in support of legislation to give consumers more control over their personal information, require companies to disclose how they collect and use consumer data, and impose penalties for data breaches and misuse of consumer data. The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has been held out as the best agency to implement this new regulation. But for any such legislation to be effective, it must protect the courageous whistleblowers who risk their careers to expose data breaches and unauthorized use of consumers’ private data.

Whistleblowers strengthen regulatory regimes, and cybersecurity regulation would be no exception. Republican and Democratic leaders from the executive and legislative branches have extolled the virtues of whistleblowers. High-profile cases abound. Recently, Christopher Wylie exposed Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of Facebook user data to manipulate voters, including its apparent theft of data from 50 million Facebook users as part of a psychological profiling campaign. Though additional research is needed, the existing empirical data reinforces the consensus that whistleblowers help prevent, detect, and remedy misconduct. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that protecting and incentivizing whistleblowers could help the government address the many complex challenges facing our nation’s information systems.

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June 3, 2019 breaches, courts, cybersecurity, disclosure, laws, Security technology, whistleblowers Read more >

Visiting the NSA

Yesterday, I visited the NSA. It was Cyber Command’s birthday, but that’s not why I was there. I visited as part of the Berklett Cybersecurity Project, run out of the Berkman Klein Center and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. (BERKman hewLETT — get it? We have a web page, but it’s badly out of date.)

It was a full day of meetings, all unclassified but under the Chatham House Rule. Gen. Nakasone welcomed us and took questions at the start. Various senior officials spoke with us on a variety of topics, but mostly focused on three areas:

  • Russian influence operations, both what the NSA and US Cyber Command did during the 2018 election and what they can do in the future;

  • China and the threats to critical infrastructure from untrusted computer hardware, both the 5G network and more broadly;

  • Machine learning, both how to ensure a ML system is compliant with all laws, and how ML can help with other compliance tasks.

It was all interesting. Those first two topics are ones that I am thinking and writing about, and it was good to hear their perspective. I find that I am much more closely aligned with the NSA about cybersecurity than I am about privacy, which made the meeting much less fraught than it would have been if we were discussing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, Section 215 the USA Freedom Act (up for renewal next year), or any 4th Amendment violations. I don’t think we’re past those issues by any means, but they make up less of what I am working on.

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May 22, 2019 china, cybersecurity, fisa, infrastructure, machinelearning, nationalsecuritypolicy, nsa, privacy, russia, Security technology Read more >

Why Isn’t GDPR Being Enforced?

Politico has a long article making the case that the lead GDPR regulator, Ireland, has too cozy a relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies to effectively regulate their privacy practices.

Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee, having wooed top Silicon Valley firms to the Emerald Isle with promises of low taxes, open access to top officials, and help securing funds to build glittering new headquarters.

Now, data-privacy experts and regulators in other countries alike are questioning Ireland’s commitment to policing imminent privacy concerns like Facebook’s reintroduction of facial recognition software and data sharing with its recently purchased subsidiary WhatsApp, and Google’s sharing of information across its burgeoning number of platforms.

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May 2, 2019 cybersecurity, gdpr, ireland, loopholes, nationalsecuritypolicy, Security technology Read more >

A “Department of Cybersecurity”

Presidential candidate John Delaney has announced a plan to create a Department of Cybersecurity.

I have long been in favor of a new federal agency to deal with Internet — and especially Internet of Things — security. The devil is in the details, of course, and it’s really easy to get this wrong. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, I outline a strawman proposal; I call it the “National Cyber Office” and model it on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But regardless of what you think of this idea, I’m glad that at least someone is talking about it.

Slashdot thread. News story.

EDITED TO ADD: Yes, this post is perilously close to presidential politics. Any comment that opines on the qualifications of this, or any other, presidential candidate will be deleted.

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April 17, 2019 cybersecurity, infrastructure, internetofthings, nationalsecuritypolicy, Security technology Read more >

More on the Triton Malware

FireEye is releasing much more information about the Triton malware that attacks critical infrastructure. It has been discovered in more places.

This is also a good — but older — article on Triton. We don’t know who wrote it. Initial speculation was Iran; more recent speculation is Russia. Both are still speculations.

Fireeye report. BoingBoing post.

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April 16, 2019 attribution, cybersecurity, infrastructure, malware, Security technology Read more >

An Argument that Cybersecurity Is Basically Okay

Andrew Odlyzko’s new essay is worth reading — “Cybersecurity is not very important“:

Abstract: There is a rising tide of security breaches. There is an even faster rising tide of hysteria over the ostensible reason for these breaches, namely the deficient state of our information infrastructure. Yet the world is doing remarkably well overall, and has not suffered any of the oft-threatened giant digital catastrophes. This continuing general progress of society suggests that cyber security is not very important. Adaptations to cyberspace of techniques that worked to protect the traditional physical world have been the main means of mitigating the problems that occurred. This “chewing gum and baling wire”approach is likely to continue to be the basic method of handling problems that arise, and to provide adequate levels of security.

I am reminded of these two essays. And, as I said in the blog post about those two essays:

This is true, and is something I worry will change in a world of physically capable computers. Automation, autonomy, and physical agency will make computer security a matter of life and death, and not just a matter of data.

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March 20, 2019 cybersecurity, internetofthings, Security technology Read more >