报告题目：Coping with Digital Extortion: an Experimental Study of Directive Incentive and Social Norms

报告人：汪静国  教授

邀请人：裘江南  教授

时间及地点：2019年6月27日 上午10:30-12:00；大连理工大学经管学院B309

报告摘要：Digital extortion emerges as one of the most significant threats to organizations that increasingly rely on information technologies for their business and operations. We employ a combination of game theory, human-subject experimentation, and behavioral economics modeling to study the interplay between an attacker and a defender community. We focus on two potential solutions to incentivize the defenders’ engagement of investing in security and/or refusal to pay ransoms to mitigate the threat. The first one is a direct incentive intervention as a penalty to pay a ransom. We find that it does not effectively decrease the defenders’ payment rates because the attacker strategically reduces his ransoms to compensate. Neither does it increase investment rates on average significantly. The second one, an indirect manipulation of social interactions in the form of enabling communication, does result in higher investment rates. We further develop a structural model based on quantal response equilibrium framework. The model is designed to isolate the impacts of strategic interactions, the impacts of social norms in investment and refusal to pay, and noisy decision-making behaviors. Model estimates confirm that social norms are indeed important in driving the defenders’ response to digital extortion and their impacts can be manipulated. Analyses of communication messages of the defenders reveal that discussing mitigating strategies amplifies the influence of social norms. This study highlights the need of investigating invention strategies based on social norms, where the attacker has less power to counteract. It illustrates the challenges and offers potential approaches in fighting against digital extortion for policy makers.

报告人简介：Jingguo Wang is a Full Professor of Information Systems in College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington. He is also a Professor and Haitian scholar of Dalian university of technology. He received his Ph.D. Degree in SUNY-Buffalo and Bachelor degree from Fudan University. His work has been published in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, among others. His papers have received best paper awards at AMCIS and the International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection. His research has been supported by National Science Foundation and the University of Texas at Arlington.