*This event has been canceled.*
On Thursday, March 12, 2020, the Strauss Center and the Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics (CEPA) at The University of Texas at Austin will welcome Tyler Moore, Tandy Associate Professor of Cybersecurity and Information Assurance in the Tandy School of Computer Science at the University of Tulsa, for its "Cybersecurity Speaker Series." This talk is more technical than the lunchtime talk, but is also free and open to the public.
While we often think of cybersecurity as a purely technical endeavor, it has in fact long been plagued by failures better explained through economics. Firms often face misaligned incentives over whether to take precautions, and they experience information asymmetries over the true cost of attacks and the effectiveness of defenses. Insurance has regularly been promoted as a way to fix these problems.
In this talk, Moore will describe some recent work that examines how and whether insurance can play a positive role in strengthening cybersecurity. Lack of data on the true magnitude of losses and which countermeasures are effective could be overcome by insurers incentivized to gather relevant data and put it to use. To that end, he will first present a method to estimate loss distributions for cyber incidents by examining published prices for insurance policies shared with regulators. Next, he will discuss whether warranties attached to cyber products and services convey useful signals of security quality. Finally, Moore will consider whether cyber insurance could achieve public policy goals with private-sector means. Insurers assess organizational security postures, prescribe security procedures and controls, and provide post-incident services. He will evaluate how such mechanisms impact security, identify market dynamics restricting their effectiveness, and sketch out possible futures for cyber insurance as governance.
Moore's research focuses on the economics of information security, the study of electronic crime, and the development of policy for strengthening security. He is also interested in digital currencies and critical infrastructure protection. Moore directs the Security Economics Lab at TU. He’s also director of StopBadware, a nonprofit anti-malware organization. Prior to joining TU, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University, the Norma Wilentz Hess Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Wellesley College, and an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University. Moore completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, supervised by Professor Ross Anderson.