Normally people would associate the principles of science with the natural science disciplines. However, this is not the case as we can also apply them to the social sciences and by extension the field of cybersecurity. The six principles of science are relativism, objectivity, parsimony, empiricism, ethical neutrality, and determinism. Relativism is the idea of a change leads to another change. In the world of cybersecurity this can be seen as a virus that has been unleashed on a system and then a solution to stop the virus is created and implemented. Objectivity, simply means to advance knowledge without input of personal bias or one’s own point of view. Knowledge should be free from subjectivity as best it can be. We can see objectively being done when doing research on a cyber incident and writing an incident report. The report should provide objective findings and keep personal feelings or opinions out. Our third principle is parsimony, this principle just states to keep scientific explanations to its most simplest form as it can then reach a wider audience for easier understanding. We can see this again on cyberattack incident reports and how engineers explain what happened. They should try their best in avoiding engineering vernacular and keep the language as simple as possible in order to make everyone understand why something occurred. Next we have empiricism, which has us only study what our five senses can. In terms of cybersecurity, we should never use hunches or opinions to study something as that will lead to errors and wrong conclusions. Ethical Neutrality states that people need to follow ethical principles/standards in their research and work. Lastly, Determinism says that a behavior is caused by a preceding event. For example, a computer hacker hacks because they have gone through some life event that led them to do something unlawful. These six principles are very important to not only the natural science disciplines but also to us in the cybersecurity field. They can tell us a lot of how we should act and perform in our roles.
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