Keshawn Thomas                         Career Paper                               CYSE201s

Being a Cybersecurity Analyst

Cybersecurity analyst is a professional career responsible for protecting an organization, computers systems, networks, and sensitive data from different cyber threats. Their main role in the cybersecurity analyst career field is monitoring, detecting, and responding to security branches or the vulnerabilities, as well as applying the strategies to prevent future attacks. To protect digital assets, a cybersecurity analyst combines a mix of scientific knowledge, tools, and threats landscape expertise. Also, the analyst needs to be very knowledgeable about new threats in addition to their technical skills. They also work with different departments to spread awareness and also support the best security practices that are around the companies.(Bach, 2024)

Relation to Social Science Principles

One of the social sciences is relativism, and relativism is something that can be understood to mean that all things are related. Also, it highlights the needs for cybersecurity analysts to consider different features like diverse cultural, ethical, legal and organizational perspectives when creating security strategies and making the hard decisions. For example, a way a cybersecurity analyst interacts with groups and the society could be when website users choose their passwords and usually tries to make it as simple as possible. That could be a problem in the long run because being a cybersecurity analyst your job is to protect all those types of information from attacks and cyber threats.

Other social sciences that go into cybersecurity are ethical. However, ethical neutrality is the fact that scientists must cling to ethical standards when they conduct their research. Also, it includes protecting the rights of the individual they study. For cybersecurity analyst ethics it applies a social and ethical framework to create a good balance between the surveillance for security and respect for individual privacy. For example, if you were working at a data collection company and your main focus was to monitor the data and employees collecting it. And two of the main focuses that we are looking at is clear communication and training sessions for transparency and consent. 

Another social sciences that go into cybersecurity are determinism. And believing in determinism does not mean that you stop holding people accountable. It also means that someone is completely controlled by something that happened before.

Relation to Marginalized groups

Most marginalized groups experience a lot of different social, economic, and physical factors that result in their exclusion from the technology, communication technologies and the important digital services. So, the digital exclusion is put together by three main factors, which is physical access, skills, and inequalities of access. First, physical access is put together by marginalized groups without access to different devices and technology infrastructure which can’t use security technologies and it puts the technology at a high risk of being compromised by a cyberattack. Second, they may have less skills to really understand and correctly use the security and privacy features, and again this also could increase it being compromised by a cyberattack. Third, inequalities of access while there are numerous factors prolong inequalities of access to technology and cybersecurity measures.(Alexander,2020)

Conclusion

In conclusion, a cybersecurity analyst is a very important career choice in order to protect different data, computer systems, networks, and sensitive information for organizations and individuals. The career cybersecurity analyst has a lot of different social sciences that can be related to the overall job, things like relativism, ethics ,and determinism to make this a successful and effective career choice. Digital exclusion has three main factors which were physical access, skills, and inequalities which the three factors really had overall  on the cybersecurity career. Cyber security analyst, the job allows me to support and protect these underserved and marginalized groups of people through ethical practices relating to them.

References 

bdoan002, P. by. (2024a, December 7). Bach-Nien Doan. BachNien Doan. https://sites.wp.odu.edu/bach-niendoan/2024/12/07/intersections-of-cybersecurity-analysts-to-social-science/ 

Veksler, Vladislav D., et al. “Cognitive Models in Cybersecurity: Learning From Expert Analysts and Predicting Attacker Behavior.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, 2020, pp. 1049–1049, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01049.

Ganin, Alexander A., et al. “Multicriteria Decision Framework for Cybersecurity Risk Assessment and Management.” Risk Analysis, vol. 40, no. 1, 2020, pp. 183–99, https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12891.