News Story

Savage to Kick Off Google Cybersecurity Seminar Series, Sept. 1

Prof. Stefan Savage

The Fall 2011 Google and University of Maryland Cybersecurity Seminar Series will kick off on Thursday, September 1, at 5:30 p.m. in the J.M. Patterson Building, Rm. 3201, and will feature Prof. Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego The title of his talk will be "Looking Before You Leap: The Argument for Data-Driven Security."

Registration is required. Guests can register online at: http://goo.gl/G5tll

To date, most research efforts have focused on the technical components of the cybersecurity battle: identifying new vulnerabilities, exploits, and attacks, building and deploying new defenses, and so on. In this talk, Prof. Savage will argue for a complementary research agenda based on understanding the economic forces that drive today's Internet attacks, deconstructing the underlying value chain for attackers, and ultimately using this information to better focus on security interventions. Prof. Savage will also provide a rough sketch of the modern cyber-criminal ecosystem, describe its dependencies, and highlight some of the key questions about the future of cybersecurity.

Stefan Savage is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie Mellon University. Savage's research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, and computer security, with a current focus on embedded security and the economics of cybercrime. He currently serves as director of UCSD's Center for Network Systems (CNS) and as co-director for the Cooperative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CCIED), a joint effort between UCSD and the International Computer Science Institute.

The Google and University of Maryland Cybersecurity Seminar Series is organized by the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, a multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Maryland aimed at research, education, and technology development in cybersecurity. The Maryland Cybersecurity Center brings together faculty experts from engineering and computer science with colleagues from across campus in fields such as information sciences, business, public policy, social sciences and economics, mirroring the comprehensive perspective of the new seminar series that places special emphasis on “the human factor” of cybersecurity. For more information, please visit www.cyber.umd.edu/seminars.

August 7, 2011