Career Paper

Inside Cybersecurity incident Response: A Key Overview of the Field

Introduction

In the Field of cybersecurity incident response there are a great number of factors that go into this career. These factors consist of identifying the Human element, the relationship to social sciences, and the ethical and social considerations that revolve around it. In this paper I will explain cybersecurity incident response in its entirety while giving the appropriate information about the factors presented.

The Human Element in Incident Response
For Cybersecurity jobs identifying the human element is an important part of this line of work, so for incident response it is an important part of this career as it can potentially be a risk. In incident response it “refers to the vulnerability of individuals in an organization to either accidentally or deliberately cause security breaches ort mishandle cybersecurity incidents.” (Manpreet & Manpreet, 2024) There are multiple factors from this that could be related to this statement one of them being human error. Human error is one of the common reasons for an incident to occur online which can be the cause of either negligence, the victims lack or awareness or if the victim is being affected by someone close to them all of these factors can cause more problems to form in the process. The best way to avoid these problems can be through many different ways. One can be from learning more about the threats by being educated on what is around you online which can be from “Cybersecurity awareness programs”. A second way can be from having companies, institutions, or organizations “Establish clear polices and procedures” which can be put in the form of “Guidelines” or “incident response plans”. And lastly its important to implement technical controls so that you can make sure your data and important information stays safe from insider and outsider attack.

Applying Social Science in Incident Response
When seeing how professional incident response workers apply social science to their work its important so see the different factors that they rely on. These factors are shaped from an interdisciplinary field called social cybersecurity which helps apply the human behavior, psychology, and social interaction with incident response. Through this field incident response can examine how “individuals and communities can be takin advantage of through means of disinformation, influence, and social engineering” (Carley, 2020). Professionals in the field use social network analysis, AI, and Research on Behavior, through this they can identify bots and trolls, while also minimizing the psychological and social impact from cyber threats. Since this was the case the BEND framework was introduced and was used to categorize communication maneuvers. This in all helps cybersecurity experts better understand and respond well to cybercrimes that revolve around lying, propaganda, and manipulation.

Ethical and Social Considerations in Incident Response
In incident response there are both ethical and social considerations that should be talked about. On the incident responders have to do many things such as maintain privacy when handling important data, ensuring transparency with stakeholders, and notifying affected individuals in a timely manner. When it comes to these considerations the responders must be as accurate as possible with the information at their disposal and help and support those who were impacted by security breaches. That’s not all though they are also the ones to take the fall while making sure to minimize the damage further to protect the company. When it comes to this its important that responders are as accurate and honest as possible to their consumers and partners who were affected.

Conclusion
To Sum up what was said, the field of cybersecurity incident response has many factors to it and from each factors lies its own source of information and steps for someone in this field to know. With all the information shown its best to say that the field of cybersecurity is not a hard field to be apart of, but it is one that takes a lot of work and relies on someone who is very social and can handle situations that need customer assistance and reassurance.

References
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Carley, K. M. (2020). Social cybersecurity: An emerging science. Computational and
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Manpreet, & Manpreet. (2024, May 28). Human Risk Elements in Incident Response –
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