Christian Arevalo
Professor Yalpi
CYSE201s
10 April 2024
Career Paper
Introduction
Cybersecurity has some careers in psychology. This is because human factors are a main issue in cybersecurity. The definition of psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. This could mean emotion, personality, or social interactions. With cybersecurity, researchers can look for patterns in people’s motives for hacking. Jobs in cybersecurity that involve psychology are user experience researcher, social engineering specialist, security awareness trainer, incident response analyst, and cybersecurity policy and governance specialist.
Relating Concepts to Careers
Determinism relates to this career because the psychology of a hacker is caused by some motivation. This motivation could be revenge from a previous interaction between themselves and another person (Taylor, 2023). Experiments are done more in cybersecurity careers that involve psychology. Researchers want to find similar characteristics in hackers to determine a common motive (Taylor, 2023). Field studies are also done to observe the behaviors of trespassers. As said before, human factors are what is studied in cybersecurity psychology careers. This could be the hacker or the victim. Questions such as “What kind of behaviors are seen in the hacker or victim?” are asked (Taylor, 2023).
Connection with Marginalized Groups
Groups such as the elderly, LGTPQ, and women are all targets of hacks. This is because these groups are easy to manipulate or receive a lot of hate. Researchers have found that cyber offenders abuse their power over these groups by finding things that hurt them (McAlaney, 2016). The elderly don’t know any better, it is easy to lie about your identity with the elderly. LGTPQ people are targeted because they are different, sometimes people online will taunt their targets with words or offensive pictures (McAlaney, 2016). Women are targets because some male offenders think that they have power over women and start harassing them with offensive words or pictures (McAlaney, 2016). These cyber careers observe the patterns in these offenders to be able to teach these patterns to people to improve cyber hygiene (McAlaney, 2016). Some challenges in this process are finding ways to teach these patterns to people, catching offenders, and having victims submit reports on their offenders (McAlaney, 2016). These are problems because if only specific groups are reporting their problems, then the data will be slightly skewed towards that group (McAlaney, 2016).
Interactions in Society
Psychology in cybersecurity interacts with society by finding patterns in social media (Patterson, 2019). These careers can also interact with other cybersecurity workers to give them insight into new programs or devices (Patterson, 2019). The purpose of these careers is to reduce the problems caused by cyber offenders so that everyone can have an equal experience online. Some careers can research people to gather information about how the average person acts online (Patterson, 2019). This can also gather information on the average person’s cyber habits and hygiene.
Works Cited
Patterson, et al. Behavioral Cybersecurity Applications of Personality Psychology and Computer Science. 2019.
McAlaney, John, et al. “The Social Psychology of Cybersecurity.” Psychologist (London, England : 1988), vol. 29, no. 9, 2016, pp. 686–89.
Taylor, Jacqui, and Monica Whitty. “An Exploration of the Awareness and Attitudes of Psychology Students Regarding Their Psychological Literacy for Working in the Cybersecurity Industry.” Psychology Learning and Teaching, 2023, doi:10.1177/14757257231214612.