Modern day cybercrime is largely profit-fueled and much of modern day
computer security is focused on developing new defenses that close
security gaps, which allow criminals to exploit vulnerable systems.
However, this focus on understanding the technical methods used by
cyber criminals has not been matched by a complimentary effort to
understand the underlying economic factors that drive much of this
large scale cybercrime. In this talk, I will demonstrate that an
understanding of the underlying value chain of a cyberciminal business
can play a key role in allowing defenders to make better informed
decisions about potential places to successfully intervene. As a case
study, I'll show the decomposition of the value chain for spam
advertised counterfeit goods and how an empirical analysis of this
business can be used to launch an informed intervention directed at a
vulnerable point along their value chain.