Realities of cybercrime (online lectures)

I've been pointing to this UW/UCSD/UC Berkeley cybersecurity course a lot this quarter, but IMO last week's lectures, on large-scale Internet criminal activity, were some of the best yet. If you care even a little bit about Internet security (and if you're reading this in a web browser, you should) then you ought to watch them. These are so good that I'm going to do more than link to the online archive this time; I'm going to link to individual lecture videos and slides.

(Note that if you get WebViewer, you'll get synchronized slides and video, but you should be able to follow along reasonably well by manually paging PDF or PowerPoint slides with the video.)

• First up is Microsoft's David Aucsmith. Aucsmith's got decades of cybersecurity experience, plus access to a wealth of empirical data on real-world, large-scale patterns of cybercrime that few people in the world can match. There's a ton of interesting stuff here. Among other things, Aucsmith's data on the typical timeline of exploit development has actually caused me to change sides in the "full disclosure vs. 'responsible' disclosure" debate.

  [ Video: Windows Media, streaming WebViewer, WebViewer download ]
  [ Slides: PDF, PowerPoint ]

• Next up is University of Washington's Steve Gribble, speaking about a study that he and some colleagues did recently on spyware "in the wild". Some interesting/shocking tidbits include the fact that about 0.1% of all "randomly selected" web pages contain a "drive-by download" spyware installer (see the talk for details about what "randomly selected" means). Also, Gribble et al. found some form of spyware in one out of eight downloadable executables on the web. And that's just the spyware their methodology can detect. Incredible.

  [ Video: Windows Media, streaming WebViewer, WebViewer download ]
  [ Slides: PDF, PowerPoint ]

• Last but not least, there's Turing Award winner/distributed systems demigod Butler Lampson --- who's currently at Microsoft, but is best-known for inventing just about everything under the sun while at Berkeley, Xerox PARC, and DEC SRC. Lampson's got two things to say here. First, he says you can only improve Internet security when there's a credible way to punish people for being bad to you. Second, he says you can only improve computer system security by dividing your computer into two halves, one trusted and one not-trusted, which he calls your "green box" and "red box" respectively. This is probably the most entertaining of the three lectures, mostly because of Lampson's brash, mile-a-minute speaking style.

  [ Video: Windows Media, streaming WebViewer, WebViewer download ]
  [ Slides: PDF, PowerPoint ]

BTW, the videos above are all quite large --- on the order of 100 MB each, so treat appropriately.