Monthly Archives: March 2016

Met police chief blaming the victims

Commissioner Hogan-Howe of the Met said on Thursday that the banks should not refund fraud victims because it “rewards” them for being lax about internet security. This was too much to pass up, so I wrote a letter to the editor of the Times, which has just been published. As the Times is behind a paywall, here is the text.

Sir, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe argues that banks should not refund online fraud victims as this would make people careless with their passwords and anti-virus software (p1, March 24, and letters Mar 25 & 26). This is called secondary victimisation. Thirty years ago, a chief constable might have said that rape victims had themselves to blame for wearing nice clothes; if he were to say that nowadays, he’d be sacked. Hogan-Howe’s view of bank fraud is just as uninformed, and just as offensive to victims.

About 5 percent of computers running Windows are infected with malware, and common bank fraud malware such as Zeus lets the fraudster redirect transactions. You think you’re paying £150 to your electricity bill, while the malware is actually sending £9000 to Russia. The average person is helpless against this; everything seems normal, and antivirus products usually only detect it afterwards.

Much of the blame lies with the banks, who let the users of potentially infected computers make large payments instantly, rather than after a day or two, as used to be the case. They take this risk because regulators let them dump much of the cost of the resulting fraud on customers.

The elephant in the room is that the Met has been claiming for years that property crime is falling, when in fact it’s just going online like everything else. We’re now starting to get better crime figures; it’s time we got better policing, and better bank regulation too.

Ross Anderson FRS FREng
Professor of Security Engineering
University of Cambridge

What do we mean by scale?

Online booking is now open for the annual Lovelace lecture, which I’m giving in London on March 15th. I’ll be using the event to try to develop a cross-cutting theme that arises from my research but is of wider interest. What do we mean by scale?

Back when computing was expensive, computer science started out worrying about how computations scaled – such as which sorting algorithms ran as n², n log n or even n. Once software development became the bottleneck, we started off by trying the same approach (measuring code entropy or control graph complexity), but moved on to distinguishing what types of complexity could be dealt with by suitable tools. Mass-market computing and communications brought network effects, and scalability started to depend on context (this is where security economics came in). Now we move to “Big Data” the dependency on people becomes more explicit. Few people have stopped to think of human factors in scaling terms. Do we make information about many people available to many, or to few? What about the complexity of the things that can be done with personal data? What about costs now versus in the future, and the elasticity of demand associated with such costs? Do you just count the data subjects, do you count the attackers too, or do you add the cops as well?

I’ve been quoted as saying “You can have security, functionality, scale – choose any two” or words to that effect. I’ll discuss this and try to sketch the likely boundaries, as well as future research directions. The discussion will cross over from science and engineering to economics and politics; recent proposed legislation in the UK, and court cases in the USA, would impose compliance burdens on people trying to scale systems up from one country to many.

The students we’re training to be the next generation of developers and entrepreneurs will need a broader understanding of what’s involved in scaling systems up, and in this talk I’ll try to explore what that means. Maybe I’m taking a risk with this talk, as I’m trying to assemble into a row a lot of facts that are usually found in different columns. But I do hope it will not be boring.