Paper Co-Authored by Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn and Zhou Receives Honorable Mention in NSA Competition

A paper co-authored by four leading experts in the growing field of cybersecurity economics has been awarded honorable mention by the Research Directorate of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the NSA’s fourth annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper competition.

Lawrence Gordon, Martin Loeb and William Lucyshyn, all of whom hold appointments in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), and Lei Zhou, who is an visiting assistant professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, co-authored the paper, “Increasing Cybersecurity Investments in Private Sector Firms,” which was published in the Journal of Cybersecurity in 2015.

The paper focuses on developing an economics-based analytical framework for assessing the impact of government incentives/regulations designed to offset the tendency to under-invest in cybersecurity-related activities by private sector firms.

It is one of two papers receiving honorable mention for its “scientific contribution to the cybersecurity literature.” According to Gordon, who also serves as the EY Alumni Professor of Managerial Accounting and Information Assurance at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, “it is both an honor and pleasure for us to receive this recognition for our research related to applying economics to the field of cybersecurity.”

The competition was established in 2013 to recognize security papers that “best reflect the conduct of good science” in the field of cybersecurity. This marks the third year that MC2 has won or received an honorable mention in the competition. MC2 faculty members Michael Hicks and Elaine Shi, along with doctoral student Chang Liu, won the competition in 2014 for their paper, “Memory Trace Oblivious Program Execution.” The paper “Before We Knew It: An Empirical Study of Zero-Day Attacks in the Real World” authored by MC2 faculty member Tudor Dumitras and Leyla Yumer of Symantec Research Labs received an honorable mention in 2013.

Gordon, Loeb, Lucyshyn and Zhou will be honored Nov. 2 at an award ceremony, hosted by the NSA’s Director of Research, where their paper will be presented before an audience of cybersecurity experts.

MC2 is supported by the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences and the A. James Clark School of Engineering. It is one of 16 centers and labs in UMIACS.