Peer(ing) pressure: a cybersecurity intervention at global scale in the internet infrastructure

Abstract We evaluate a rare successful intervention in the management of Internet infrastructure—an anti-spoofing campaign, which has achieved genuine traction against an issue that has dogged the network engineering community for more than 30 years. We study the Traceback initiative—an intervention, which sought to tackle Denial of Service attacks at global scale by making it harder for attackers to spoof their traffic. While much scholarship in the security literature has sought to establish the perverse commercial incentives frustrating action against cybercrime and identify possible ways to alter these, in this case we observe a community acting to short-circuit them entirely. We show, through interviews and autoethnographic reflection from key players, how the issue of spoofing was relocated away from the commercial incentive structures of a decentralized community of competing providers with little motivation to solve the issue. We develop previous work applying theory from infrastructure studies to cybercrime economies, developing a new account of how power can be asserted within infrastructure to achieve change, apparently against the grain of other long-standing incentives.