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Vern Paxson of the Networking Group leads security research at ICSI. At our research review, he gave a talk titled "Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives," which described recent ICSI research on the socio-economic side of Internet security. Here is the talk abstract:

Security is at once a technical property of a system and a socio-economic property of the environment in which it operates. While the vast majority of security research and practice focuses on the first of these, a perspective limited to technical considerations misses an entire half of the problem space: the human element. This talk sketches some recent work exploring security issues from a socio-economic perspective, which highlights both interesting new problems to tackle and the power that such approaches can potentially provide to defenders.

Slides from the talk are available here as a .pdf file.

For more information on security work at ICSI, here are a few recent technical papers:

• Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service
• PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs
• Prudent Practices for Designing Malware Experiments: Status Quo and Outlook
• Adapting Social Spam Infrastructure for Political Censorship
• Measuring Pay-per-Install: The Commoditization of Malware Distribution
• Show Me the Money: Characterizing Spam-Advertised Revenue