Myles Watson April 4, 2024
A Career in Cybersecurity and how it depends on Social Science Research and Principles
With our increased reliance on digital technology comes the increase in cybercrime. Digital technology touches our personal, economic, business, and governmental affairs. Essential for many businesses, cybersecurity and protecting data from attacks, viruses, and cybercriminals is vital (Abelson et al, 2024). Thanks to the growth of the internet and related technology, cyber security has become a growing specialized study in the world of information technology among many professional certification programs and academic studies among colleges and universities. Yet the profession of cyber security covers a broad spectrum of specialties, from network security, software security, development etc. (Furnell, 2021). Noteworthy, cybersecurity careers have both technical and non-technical elements, and can be made from multidisciplinary perspectives with clear links and relevant influence from social, political, legal, criminological, and economic facets.
Digital Forensic Examiner
Digital forensics is a specialized forensic that focuses on identifying, acquiring, processing, analyzing, and reporting on electronic data (Goni et al, 2020). Almost all criminal activity involves some form of digital data or cyber criminology, and law enforcement depends heavily on its support. Electronic evidence and its sources can range from computer hardware, smartphones, internet browsing, or software usage. The goal of a digital forensic examiner for law enforcement is to extract electronic data, process it into intelligence and provide prosecutors with findings useful and supportive to crime solving. Equally, important is understanding the dynamics of human factors. Let’s investigate the crime of child pornography. A digital forensic
examiner might use research and understanding of social factors and psychology to investigate such cybercrime, hence the mutual dependency of social science and cybersecurity. A digital investigation into this type of cybercrime could involve preserving evidence from a computer, smartphone, internet browsing history, stored videos, animation, or image altering. Now let’s investigate child sex traffic. Similarly, a digital forensic examiner’s work with cyber criminology is not mutually exclusive from the social science lens. Furthermore, children are among a marginalized and vulnerable group and these crimes often disproportionately impact them. Another example, cyberbullying which is a social and health concern for many children and in the last decade there has been steady increase in several studies focusing on this type of cyber crime and the psychological and societal factors that influence it (Espinoza & Wright 2018).
Cyber threats, attacks, breaches, internet misuse, have all become normal day-to-day cyber risk because of the world’s dependency on electronic devices both personally and for business. Digital forensic examiners are also met with challenges locating, retrieving, and analyzing evidence from computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices. These systems tend to hold an incredible amount of information and examiners must maintain privacy while conducting investigations. Examiners could inevitably gain access to more data that might not be included or from a third party not relevant to the investigation (Goni et al, 2020). Factors such as human rights, confidentiality, data integrity must be properly practiced so not to jeopardize the evidence.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a career in digital forensics is not mutually exclusive from social science research and principles. A digital forensics examiner will often study and use more than one social science lens, during their day-to-day job functions. Clear links and relevant input can be
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pulled from social, political, legal, criminological, and economic dimensions which demonstrate the correlation between the two. Cyber laws and cyber policies are often developed from the human-factor approach (Furnell, 2021). Legal mechanisms are often developed to control the behaviors associated with cyber risks. Nevertheless, the work of a digital forensic examiner is important to law enforcement but almost always involves social science research and principles.
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References:
Abelson et al., (2024). Bugs In Our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning. Journal of Cybersecurity, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024,
Espinoza, G., M. What Do We Know and Do We Go Child Adol 11, 1–5
Ibrahim Goni, Jerome Mishion Gumpy, Timothy Umar Maigari, Murtala Muhammad, Abdulrahman Saidu. (2020). Cybersecurity and Cyber Forensics: Machine Learning Approach. Machine Learning Research, 5(4), 46-50. https:///doi.org/10.11648/j.mlr.20200504.11
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