Arbor Networks: Security to the Core

A few of us have been exploring the idea of using predictive markets as a means of exploring the realm of information security. Can we predict what kinds of software attacks we’ll see in the coming weeks? Can we leverage the crowd’s wisdom to tell us something? After all, economics markets and options trading already reveal subtleties about the world of finance and business, what about other information pools?Predictive markets are nothing new, in fact they’re popular in politics these days. If you look at the research that has come out of The Iowa Electronic Markets and election prediction, you’ll see what I mean: powerful stuff. So much so that they’re taking off at places like Yahoo!. Trying to capitalize on this is a new website, Inkling Markets. After dabbling with a few friends at setting up a trading space, this ready-made space makes a lot more sense: it let me get right to the chase.

To that end, I’ve created the first of what I hope will be a series of markets trying to predict infosec data. This first one is a simple market, “How many critical vulnerabilities will be addressed by Microsoft in their March, 2007, Security Bulletin cycle?” (link). If you have an account you can log in and begin trading - it’s free, and I already made 107 points on a Dick Cheney trade. A friend points out that maybe a simple over-under market would have been better, which is fair. Next time it’ll be more straightforward, I think. If this goes well, I’ll look at setting up a few more markets, too, for some more long term trading.

Begin trading: How many critical vulnerabilities will be addressed by Microsoft in their March, 2007, Security Bulletin cycle? @ Inklink Markets

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Arbor Networks, Vulnerabilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.