Framing Dependencies Introduced by Underground Commoditization
Damon McCoy
NYU
SWS Colloquium
Prof. McCoy is an Assistant Professor at New York University in the
Computer Science and Engineering department. His focus is on empirical
measurements of the socio-economics of cyber attackers and security of
cyber-physical systems.
Internet crime has become increasingly dependent on the underground
economy: a loose federation of specialists selling capabilities,
services, and resources explicitly tailored to the abuse ecosystem.
Through these emerging markets, modern criminal entrepreneurs piece
together dozens of à la carte components into entirely new criminal
endeavors. In this talk, I'll discuss parts of this ecosystem and show
that criminal reliance on this black market introduces fragile
dependencies that, if disrupted, undermine entire operations that as a
composite appear intractable to protect against.