Economics of Information Security and Privacy

Abstract

Many of the Internet security incidents are caused by agents which act moved by economic incentives. When that is the case, it is possible to model attacker´s incentives by applying economics principles and, if we can collect appropriate data, we can use the model to have a better understanding of the risk imposed by these threats. This paper presents a simple model that represents the economic incentives for launching DDoS attacks against a specific telecommunications service. In addition, some data has been collected in order to quantify some of the variables of the model. Finally, some simulations have been performed to have a better knowledge of the risk of suffering this kind of attacks and propose solutions to mitigate it.