Economics of Security

Fourth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security to be held at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University (2-3 June) website with papers. Some of the papers look interesting with new ideas and suggested approaches to econometric modeling but, in the main, they rely on the same data reported in the media on the cost of spam, phishing, viruses and so forth.  Having said that, there are those that do their own little case studies on things like the propensity of users to sell their private information. But even the most elegant econometric models look shaky, if the how the underlying data was arrived at is not transparent and with no published methodology. And a lot of the data cited falls into that category.