The National Science Foundation has awarded George Mason University, $10 million over a five-year period to examine how illegal activities take place in the cyber environment and, most importantly, how they can be prevented. George Mason University is joining a project that has been underway for over a decade with researchers and computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley.

Among the goals of the ongoing research is to examine both the technical and economic aspects of Internet security including the motivations of attackers; their relationships with victims; how their techniques evolve over time; and how these attacks can be thwarted.

Professor Damon McCoy, principal investigator on the project and assistant professor of computer science in George Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering said, “There are many rich areas to explore, such as understanding how trust among thieves emerges and how underground forums enable efficiencies in the cyber crime marketplace. This grant will allow us to do just that and we are excited to investigate better methods to tackle cyber crime and gain a deeper understanding of this conflict from the human and economic perspective.”