Category Archives: economics of security

The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness

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Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses, and television stations. Tallying the total cost will take time. The outage affected more than 8.5 million Windows computers, and the cost will surely be in the billions of dollars­—easily matching the most costly previous cyberattacks, such as NotPetya.

The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline…

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Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

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Last week, the Internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global Internet depends on countless obscure pieces of software written and maintained by even more obscure unpaid, distractible, and sometimes vulnerable volunteers. It’s an untenable situation, and one that is being exploited by malicious actors. Yet precious little is being done to remedy it…

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In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956–2024

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Last week, I posted a short memorial of Ross Anderson. The Communications of the ACM asked me to expand it. Here’s the longer version.
EDITED TO ADD (4/11): Two weeks before he passed away, Ross gave an 80-minute interview where he told his life … Continue reading In Memoriam: Ross Anderson, 1956–2024→

Ross Anderson

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Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge.

I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and Information Security. (Okay, he created both—I helped.) It was before 1998, when we wrote about the problems with key escrow systems. I was one of the people he brought to the Newton Institute, at Cambridge University, for the six-month cryptography residency program he ran (I mistakenly didn’t stay the whole time)—that was in 1996…

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Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023

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BleepingComputer has the details. It’s $2M less than in 2022, but it’s still a lot.

The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program’s launch in 2010 has reached $59 million.

For Android, the world’s most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded over $3.4 million.

Google also increased the maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities concerning Android to $15,000, driving increased community reports.

During security conferences like ESCAL8 and hardwea.io, Google awarded $70,000 for 20 critical discoveries in Wear OS and Android Automotive OS and another $116,000 for 50 reports concerning issues in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables…

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Drones and the US Air Force

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Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.

The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn…

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The Security Vulnerabilities of Message Interoperability

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Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other:

The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a real Pandora’s box. How will the networks manage keys, authenticate users, and moderate content? How much metadata will have to be shared, and how?

In our latest paper, One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging, we explore the security tensions, the conflicts of interest, the usability traps, and the likely consequences for individual and institutional behaviour…

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What Will It Take?

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What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously? Not minimal-change seriously. Not here-and-there seriously. But really seriously. What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously enough to enact substantive legislative changes that would address the problems? It’s not enough for the average person to be afraid of cyberattacks. They need to know that there are engineering fixes—and that’s something we can provide.

For decades, I have been waiting for the “big enough” incident that would finally do it. In 2015, Chinese military hackers hacked the Office of Personal Management and made off with the highly personal information of about 22 million Americans who had security clearances. In 2016, the Mirai botnet leveraged millions of Internet-of-Things devices with default admin passwords to launch a denial-of-service attack that disabled major Internet platforms and services in both North America and Europe. In 2017, hackers—years later we learned that it was the Chinese military—hacked the credit bureau Equifax and stole the personal information of 147 million Americans. In recent years, ransomware attacks have knocked hospitals offline, and many articles have been written about Russia inside the U.S. power grid. And last year, the Russian SVR hacked thousands of sensitive networks inside civilian critical infrastructure worldwide in what we’re now calling Sunburst (and used to call SolarWinds)…

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Hacking the Tax Code

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The tax code isn’t software. It doesn’t run on a computer. But it’s still code. It’s a series of algorithms that takes an input—financial information for the year—and produces an output: the amount of tax owed. It’s incredibly complex code; there are a bazillion details and exceptions and special cases. It consists of government laws, rulings from the tax authorities, judicial decisions, and legal opinions.

Like computer code, the tax code has bugs. They might be mistakes in how the tax laws were written. They might be mistakes in how the tax code is interpreted, oversights in how parts of the law were conceived, or unintended omissions of some sort or another. They might arise from the exponentially huge number of ways different parts of the tax code interact…

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SolarWinds and Market Incentives

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In early 2021, IEEE Security and Privacy asked a number of board members for brief perspectives on the SolarWinds incident while it was still breaking news. This was my response.

The penetration of government and corporate networks worldwide is the result of inadequate cyberdefenses across the board. The lessons are many, but I want to focus on one important one we’ve learned: the software that’s managing our critical networks isn’t secure, and that’s because the market doesn’t reward that security.

SolarWinds is a perfect example. The company was the initial infection vector for much of the operation. Its trusted position inside so many critical networks made it a perfect target for a supply-chain attack, and its shoddy security practices made it an easy target…

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