Thank you, internets, for all the feedback I’ve gotten on BoomTime: Risk As Economics . Of course my slides are nigh indecipherable without my voiceover, and my notes didn’t make it to the slideshare, so here are some notes to fill in (some) of the blanks until the video hits YouTube ( SiRA members will get early access to SiRAcon15 videos via the SiRA Discourse forum , BTW). (You will want to look at the notes and the slides side by side, probably, as one doesn’t make sense w/o the other.)
An intro here is that in addition to being a product manager specializing in designing large-scale, data-driven security/anti-fraud/anti-abuse automation (yep, that’s a thing), I’m also an economics nerd. (Currently working on an MS in Applied Econ at JHU ). Given my background in payments, and a general penchant for “following the money”, framing technology problems on platforms through an economic/financial lens is second nature.
A list of typical themes one hears when discussing information security & economics: within businesses we are requested to talk about exposures and threats in terms of financial impact, or consider the financial (money) drivers. Also the theme of information asymmetries (Market for Lemons) is a big theme of information economics and of software markets in general: when information about quality of a product is difficult to find, that lack of transparency drives down prices, and we get less incentives to imp