This talk reviews several key results from viewing information security through the lens of economics.  First, as distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, incentives are becoming as important as 
technical design in achieving dependability. Second,   incomplete and 
inaccurate information has undermined existing efforts  to strengthen security.  Third, the talk describes the importance of externalities
-- the side effects that economic transactions have on third parties. 
Just as a factory belching smoke into the environment creates a negative externality for people downwind, so also people who connect infected PCs to the Internet create negative externalities in that 
their machines may emit spam, host phishing sites  and  distribute  
illegal  content  such  as crimeware.  Finally,  phishing website take-down is discussed as a case study to demonstrate the power of metrics in understanding and combating electronic crime.  Throughout the talk, I will highlight the importance of combining sound policy with technical means to improve cyber security.

Dr. Tyler Moore is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society.  Moore's research interests include the economics of information security, the study of electronic crime, and the development of policy for strengthening security.  Moore completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge (UK), supervised by Ross Anderson.  His PhD thesis investigated cooperative attack and defense in the design of decentralized wireless networks and through empirical analysis of phishing attacks on the Internet.  Moore has co-authored a report for the European Union detailing policy recommendations for overcoming failures in the provision of information security.  As an undergraduate, he studied at the University of Tulsa (USA), identifying several vulnerabilities in the public telephone network's underlying signaling protocols. Moore's PhD studies were supported by a British Marshall Scholarship and US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.