Collaborate Disseminate
Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press’s coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk. This isn’t new. I’ve written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about the psychology of risk, fear, and security. Basically, the issue is the availability heuristic. We tend to infer the probability of something… Continue reading How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism
Interesting research that shows we exaggerate the risks of something when we find it morally objectionable. From an article about and interview with the researchers: To get at this question experimentally, Thomas and her collaborators created a series of vignettes in which a parent left a child unattended for some period of time, and participants indicated the risk of harm… Continue reading Confusing Security Risks with Moral Judgments
I have written before on the vulnerabilities equities process (VEP): the system by which the US government decides whether to disclose and fix a computer vulnerability or keep it secret and use it offensively. Ari Schwartz and Rob Knake, both former Directors for Cybersecurity Policy at the White House National Security Council, have written a report describing the process as… Continue reading Report on the Vulnerabilities Equities Process
This interesting essay argues that financial risks are generally not systemic risks, and instead are generally much smaller. That’s certainly been our experience to date: While systemic risk is frequently invoked as a key reason to be on guard for cyber risk, such a connection is quite tenuous. A cyber event might in extreme cases result in a systemic crisis,… Continue reading Financial Cyber Risk Is Not Systemic Risk
Interesting research: Suphannee Sivakorn, Iasonas Polakis and Angelos D. Keromytis, "I Am Robot: (Deep) Learning to Break Semantic Image CAPTCHAs": Abstract: Since their inception, captchas have been widely used for preventing fraudsters from performing illicit actions. Nevertheless, economic incentives have resulted in an armsrace, where fraudsters develop automated solvers and, in turn, captcha services tweak their design to break the… Continue reading Breaking Semantic Image CAPTCHAs
This is good: Threats constantly change, yet our political discourse suggests that our vulnerabilities are simply for lack of resources, commitment or competence. Sometimes, that is true. But mostly we are vulnerable because we choose to be; because we’ve accepted, at least implicitly, that some risk is tolerable. A state that could stop every suicide bomber wouldn’t be a free… Continue reading Smart Essay on the Limitations of Anti-Terrorism Security