Tag Archives: misinformation

Security Defense against Long-term and Stealthy Cyberattacks (DSS 2023)

Kookyoung Han, Choi, Jin Hyuk, Yun-Sik Choi, Gene Moo Lee, Andrew B. Whinston (2023) Security Defense against Long-term and Stealthy Cyberattacks. Decision Support Systems, 166: 113912.

  • Funded by NSF (Award #1718600) and UNIST
  • Best Paper Award at KrAIS 2017
  • Presented at UT Austin (2017), UNIST (2017), INFORMS (Houston, TX 2017), CIST (Houston, TX 2017), WITS (Seoul, Korea 2017), and KrAIS (Seoul, Korea 2017)
  • Previous titles: “Misinformation and Optimal Time to Detect”, “Optimal Stopping and Strategic Espionage”, “To Disconnect or Not: A Cybersecurity Game”

Modern cyberattacks such as advanced persistent threats have become sophisticated. Hackers can stay undetected for an extended time and defenders do not have sufficient countermeasures to prevent advanced cyberattacks. Reflecting on this phenomenon, we propose a game-theoretic model to analyze strategic decisions made by a hacker and a defender in equilibrium. In our game model, the hacker launches stealthy cyberattacks for a long time and the defender decides when to disable a suspicious user based on noisy observations of the user’s activities. Damages caused by the hacker can be enormous if the defender does not immediately ban a suspicious user under certain circumstances, which can explain the emerging sophisticated cyberattacks with detrimental consequences. Our model also predicts that the hacker may opt to be behavioral to avoid worst cases. This is because behavioral cyberattacks are less threatening and the defender decides not to immediately block a suspicious user to reduce cost of false detection.

    Does Deceptive Marketing Pay? The Evolution of Consumer Sentiment Surrounding a Pseudo-Product-Harm Crisis (J. Business Ethics 2019)

    Song, Reo, Ho Kim, Gene Moo Lee, and Sungha Jang (2019) Does Deceptive Marketing Pay? The Evolution of Consumer Sentiment Surrounding a Pseudo-Product-Harm Crisis. Journal of Business Ethics, 158(3), pp. 743-761.

    The slandering of a firm’s products by competing firms poses significant threats to the victim firm, with the resulting damage often being as harmful as that from product-harm crises. In contrast to a true product-harm crisis, however, this disparagement is based on a false claim or fake news; thus, we call it a pseudo-product-harm crisis. Using a pseudo-product-harm crisis event that involved two competing firms, this research examines how consumer sentiments about the two firms evolved in response to the crisis. Our analyses show that while both firms suffered, the damage to the offending firm (which spread fake news to cause the crisis) was more detrimental, in terms of advertising effectiveness and negative news publicity, than that to the victim firm (which suffered from the false claim). Our study indicates that, even apart from ethical concerns, the false claim about the victim firm was not an effective business strategy to increase the offending firm’s performance.