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The economics of cybersecurity

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Description

Total length of the course: <1 hour

The internet was not built with security in mind — and the market, left to its own devices, has consistently failed to fix that. In this course, examine why the economics of cybersecurity are, to use a technical term, a bit mad: from the fragile volunteer-maintained infrastructure underpinning global digital life, to the perverse incentive structures that let major breaches cost their perpetrators nothing, to the long-standing habit of blame-shifting responsibility onto ordinary users. Drawing on real-life cases, the course then turns to what can actually be done — weighing regulatory interventions, the role of insurance and corporate governance, and the ultimate ambition of building security into technology by design.

Content details

The economics of cybersecurity
Introduction
Market failure
Little fixes
What big tech looks after
The cautionary tale: software
The cautionary tale: data & regulation
The cautionary tale: hardware
Where the market sort of works for security
Cost of major incidents
Blameshifting in cybersecurity
A digression on cars
Market for lemons
The regulatory intervention
Non-regulatory non-intervention
Secure by design: an impossible nirvana?