Cybersecurity Career Professional Paper

Due to the advancement of technology, there are many careers in the IT professional field. In the United States alone there are hundreds of thousands open positions. A career that piques my interest is one of an ethical hacker. I remember growing up and watching movies like the “The Matrix” and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. These were movies in the early 2000’s that incorporated hacking and cyber-intelligence into their storyline which fascinated me when I was younger. We always would get the intense scene where we had a hacker who was the brain of the team trying to perform an attack for the good guys to help them get the information needed to succeed on the mission. Ethical hackers learn and perform hacking in a professional manner, based on the direction of the client. Their job is to highlight the overall risk and vulnerabilities of a system and make suggestions on how/where to improve it. Organizations face the challenge of updating hack-preventing tactics, installing several technologies to protect the system before falling victim to the hacker, which is why it’s essential to for companies to hire an ethical hacker. An ethical hacker will benefit the company by preventing them of data theft and fraud. Professionals in this career require and depend on social science research because these hackers are apart of a subculture related to cybersecurity. Two main social science fields that I see ethical hackers dependent on is sociology and economics. With the help of these scientist conducing research, the tasks of these type of hackers will be even more efficient at their job aside from the skill and motivation required from them.

According to the American Sociological Association, a subculture is “a distinguishable group that shares several features with the dominant culture within which it exists while having unique features such as language, custom, or values. Cybersecurity has its own subcultures which are cybercriminals, fraud, professional, and hackers. The term hacker subculture pertains to all types of hackers (good & bad). Sociologist have done a lot of research to analyzing the beliefs and values of hackers. Three norms of hackers are technology, knowledge, and secrecy. Hackers are very intelligent and tend to have a connection to technology and sometimes must be in secrecy if it a criminal hacking. During this course we were required to watch a video about a twelve-year-old boy by the name Reuben Paul. He was an intelligent, self-taught hacker. He already has two of the attributes that sociologist has classified as a norm of hackers. We also gained insight by studying different individuals view on hackers. One of the most viewpoints to me was by Steven Levy, wo wrote” In Hacker: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”. Here he addressed what should be the core value and principles of hacker subculture. Some are that hackers should be judged by their acting, not their degree, race, or age. He also believes that you can create art and beauty on that make public data available and to protect private data. This is the job of an ethical hacker! They must ensure that data is protected from threats. Sociologists study the development and structure of society which could be affected easily if we did not have ethical hackers. In the dawn of international conflicts, terrorist organizations funding cybercriminals to breach security systems, either to compromise national security features or to extort huge amounts by injecting malware and denying access. Resulting in the steady rise of cybercrime.

Cybersecurity is one of the most important parts of modern economics. Economics is the study of how societies use their limited resources to produce wealth, and how the distribution of the wealth among their members is determined. Cybersecurity produces wealth either inventing a business, creating product, or by producing services related to cybersecurity. Economics ties into cybersecurity though since in today’s time wealth equals cybersecurity because being wealthy increases one’s ability to engage in secure efforts. Cybercrime now represents more than one percent of global GDP, costing organizations an estimated $1 trillion in losses in 2021. When we analyze business, and their cybersecurity polices then we must take in account how much revenue they bring in because this determines how secure and advanced their organization will be. Providing your consumers and employees with the promise of great cybersecurity practices, framework, trainings will inevitably be costly. In class the Rational Choice theory was mentioned regarding the study of economics. This theory simply states that businesses or individuals will choose a course of action that best align with their personal preference. We easily see this when we analyze how much the government or businesses determine how much they want to spend on creating cybersecurity products and professional positions. Another economic theory mentioned during this course was the theory by Marxian which states that those with power will exploit those without power for economic gain. This relates to cybersecurity because those without money will be more induced to experience cyber-attacks like hacking. Economics even has some principles that not only relate to cybersecurity in general, but these specifically to ethical hackers. Information flow refers to way communication occurs meaning that accurate information would result in the opposite effect. An example of this is if a company fails to inform consumers of a date breach resulting in consumers disengaging with either the product or business. Another principle is liability, which basically refers to the legal or financial responsibility a business or individual has for decisions and behaviors. If a company becomes compromised due to their lack of cybersecurity policies/positions, then there could be a huge lawsuit from consumers or fine from the government. While the world will continue forward into a technological setting, businesses must learn to create ways to protect the integrity of their organization through an economical view, which they can start by hiring ethical hackers.

What is Ethical Hacking | Types of Ethical Hacking | EC-Council (eccouncil.org)

Rational choice theory | Definition, Examples, & Facts | Britannica

Ethical Hackers: Filling a Vital Role in Society – Security Through Education (social-engineer.org)