Rice's book, Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software, is a kind of hacker's take on Unsafe at Any Speed, a manifesto that calls the software industry to account for its careless attitude toward security, just as Nader took the auto industry to task for its abysmal safety standards in 1965.

Rice blames the software industry for a litany of hidden costs, ranging from the infrastructure needed to fix hackable bugs in software to recent data breaches at the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon--even a Boeing 747 crash in 2005 that resulted from software glitches. All told, he places the total economic cost of security flaws in software at around $180 billion a year.

Rice's controversial solution? Create a tax on software based on the number and severity of its security bugs. Even if that means passing those costs to consumers, Rice, an instructor at the SANS Institute and a former cryptographer for the NSA and the Navy, believes that a tax is the only way to push the software industry to mend its buggy ways. Forbes.com spoke with Rice about his idea of a "vulnerability tax" and his accounting for the hidden costs of cybercrime.

Forbes.com: Why create a tax on software based on its security flaws?

Rice: This is about holding the manufacturer responsible. When you look at what hackers do, they're really just trying to discover defects with tests that the software manufacturers could be performing themselves. It's up to the manufacturer to determine how much they want to test the software before it's released.