Macroeconomic Analysis of Malware

Malware harms infected individuals by stealing computational resources and possibly authenticating information. Malware also creates negative externalities for all users by enabling the creation of botnets for criminal enterprise, e.g. DDoS or phishing. Why is there such a variance in the percentage of malware infections across nations? While there may be idiosyncratic or ad-hoc explanations for concentrations of malicious actors or innocent victims, there has been an absence of systematic cybercrime science. Computer scientists have focused primarily on empirical work without concurrent focus on potentially applicable theories in macroeconomics and criminology. This extended abstract tersely provides the results of why botnets vary by jurisdiction and region, but the focus is on an explanation of and argument for our method: macroeconomic analysis informed by crime science.