Aria Grant

CYSE 201S

Professor Trinity Woodbury

April 28, 2025

Career Paper: Cybersecurity Engineer

Cybersecurity engineers are the forefront of defense and information security in both the private and public sectors. These individuals set the standards and training required to ensure information security within the organization. They are often tasked with the creation, implementation, and enforcement of cybersecurity training within organizations. This training is often lead by the security mindset of the engineer, which has been described by some professionals “… in terms of three interlocking habitual mental processes: un-conscious monitoring for anomalies and potential threats, deliberate investigating of systems to identify security flaws, and evaluating the relative risks of those flaws once discovered.” (Schoenmakers et al., 2023). This mindset is translated into training grounded within the psychological principle that human errors and behavior are the cause of the majority of cybersecurity incidents.  The way individual engineers may determine to do their training and other job functions are partially determined by where they are located in the world. Due to social forces, mainly wealth and wealth disparity, engineers may have differing tools to work with. Wealthier nations will more commonly have more advanced and robust networks that are more available and able to respond to incidents. Nations that are not as wealthy and the cybersecurity engineers within them will not have access to the same advanced networks, tools, and security available as those in wealthier nations. This was specifically noted in a study published in 2018 regarding the cybersecurity incident responses within the Ecuadorian financial sector finding similar results to a similar study conducted within the United States, “The four biggest barriers to ensure information security in the US financial sector are: increasing sophistication of threats, emerging technologies, lack of sufficient budget, and lack of visibility. In Ecuador, our respondents report that the major internal barriers to respond to security incidents are: small size of their security teams (which can be linked to budget), lack of visibility, inadequate internal coordination, technology updating, lack of training, and lack of awareness.” (Catota et al., 2018). These barriers cause increased security opportunities due to the lack the tools, resources, and education available. Cybersecurity engineers are additionally responsible for informing, training, and the continuance of social cybersecurity. Social cybersecurity is an emerging area primarily focused utilizing social science techniques to properly identify, counter, and measure changes within human behavior. This is primarily due to the increased relevance and frequency of social engineering as a means of obtaining private data. Social engineering is the act of purposefully manipulating or deceiving a victim through psychological manipulation to gain access to a computer system or sensitive information. A recent study in 2023 found that, “…the frequency and severity of losses depend on the business sector and type of cyber threat: the most significant cyber loss event categories, by number of events, were related to data breaches and the unauthorized disclosure of data, while cyber extortion, phishing, spoofing, and other social engineering practices showed substantial growth rates.” (Shevchenko et al., 2023). The increase in social engineering is an important role and focus within modern cybersecurity practices due to the increase in both quantity and quality of social engineering attempts. Cybersecurity engineers are the leaders and first line of defense for cybersecurity operations within organizations. They infer their knowledge, experiences, and tools available to create the best security policy for each organization to follow in order to ensure technological and informational security.

References

Catota, F. E., Morgan, M. G., & Sicker, D. C. (2018). Cybersecurity incident response capabilities in the Ecuadorian financial sector. Journal of Cybersecurity, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyy002

Schoenmakers, K., Greene, D., Stutterheim, S., Lin, H., & Palmer, M. J. (2023). The security mindset: characteristics, development, and consequences. Journal of Cybersecurity, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyad010

Shevchenko, P. V., Jang, J., Malavasi, M., Peters, G. W., Sofronov, G., & Trück, S. (2023). The nature of losses from cyber-related events: risk categories and business sectors. Journal of Cybersecurity, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyac016

Aria Grant CYSE 201S

Professor Trinity Woodbury

4 April 2025

Article Review: “Prevalence and Trends of Depression among Cyberbullied Adolescents – Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2011-2019”

The study utilized the research to answer the questions of whether adolescents who cyberbullied display increased prevalence or trends towards depression, and how that data compares to other adolescent individuals who are not cyberbullied. They further separated these groups based on biological sex and race/ethnicity to understand if any variations can be seen with these categorizations. The study is related heavily to psychology due to the question specifying depression as a mental illness to focus on. Psychology helps to explain how depression exists, how it varies from adolescent to adult, and patterns in depression diagnosis over the years of studies. Additionally, sociology is another important factor within this study that specializes in why bullying as a whole takes place, the reasons cyberbullying is more prevalent than physical or in-person bullying, and the reasons why any bullying happens at all. The study utilized CDC data from 2011 to 2019 to ‘produce a nationally representative sample of students in grades 9-12.’ (Nicholson et al., 2023) The schools were selected from a list that remained proportional to each school’s enrollment, which resulted in a ‘71% response rate, with a sample size of 70,923.’ (Nicholson et al., 2023) The researchers further utilized CDC guidelines to parse through the information received from the participants to ensure that the numbers would remain consistent. Marginalized groups were individually accounted for when utilizing these methods from the CDC and showed trends for each group. This research is extremely essential because of the increased use that social media has seen over the years and how this may affect adolescents, specifically with depression. Understanding how adolescents have been affected by cyberbullying that has become more prolific within the past decade. Adolescents’ perception of online spaces is an important influence on how they will interact in online spaces. Just the feeling of being unsafe increases the chances of being victimized in online spaces. This dynamic takes greater effect when additionally analyzing the way individuals understate or do not understand how differently individuals can act in online spaces compared to real-life situations, creating a paradigm in which individuals feel comfortable until they are victimized.  This study provides an important foundation for further research to be conducted upon in regards to the effects and trends of cyberbullying.

References

Nicholson, Jason, et al. “Prevalence and Trends of Depression among Cyberbullied Adolescents – Youth Risk Behavior Survey, United States, 2011 – 2019 .” International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, vol. 6, no. 1, 31 Mar. 2023, https://doi.org/10.52306/znrr2381.

Aria Grant

CYSE 201S

Professor Woodbury

February 18, 2025

Article Review: “Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame” by Tegan S. Starr and Tiffany Lavis

Abstract

This article review evaluates Tegan S. Starr’s and Tiffany Lavis’ “Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame.” The article contributes to existing literature on revenge pornography and victim blaming, offering strong evidence linking the length of a sexual relationship with a partner to receive social backlash. While the study is sound it could benefit from a broader pool of relationship length.

Summary

Tegan S. Starr’s and Tiffany Lavis’ article begins with an explanation of the terms “revenge porn” and “victim blame.’ They identify how an intimate image is obtained by the perpetrator, the length of time a relationship occurred, and the level of trust of the perceiver as the three factors contribute to victim blame in the context of revenge porn. Using data gathered from participants’ reactions to fictional scenarios, Starr and Lavis assessed the responses from participants.

Methodology

Starr and Lavis utilized a group of 186 participants that were majority female and Caucasian, with more than half of the participants engaging in intimate text messages or Snapchat messages (Starr & Lavis, 2018). An online survey was used to inquire about two separate scenarios of revenge pornography, with the lengths of the relationship being either one month or one year, and all relationships were heterosexual. All participants were shown images, without the individual’s face and asked to rate the image based on nudity and victim blame. A mean score and standard deviation were created for each question posed.

Findings

Starr and Lavis found that how the intimate image was obtained had a negligible difference in victim blame. However, a significant difference was found between the two lengths of relationship that were tested. The relationship that was stated to have lasted one year had a decreased amount of victim blame when compared to the one-month counterpart.

Conclusion

The article is a valuable addition to existing literature surrounding revenge pornography and victim blame. Future studies would benefit from the addition of Starr and Lavis’ findings. The article is from a peer-reviewed journal, no impartiality is identifiable within the study and the scientific method is present throughout the article. The article brings concern for the rising tide of intimate images being spread or created in retaliation by ex-partners or celebrities. This article contributes to the identification of revenge pornography, the biases that exist for the perceiver, and how these biases affect the perceiver’s viewpoint.

References

Starr, T., & Lavis, T. (2018). Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame. International      Journal of Cyber Criminology, 12(2), 427–438. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3366179