Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society

Students in IT/CYSE 200T will explore how technology is related to cybersecurity from an interdisciplinary orientation.  Attention is given to the way that technologically-driven cybersecurity issues are connected to cultural, political, legal, ethical, and business domains. The learning outcomes for this course are as follows:

1. Describe how cyber technology creates opportunities for criminal behavior,
2. Identify how cultural beliefs interact with technology to impact cybersecurity strategies,
3. Understand and describe how the components, mechanisms, and functions of cyber systems produce security concerns,
4. Discuss the impact that cyber technology has on individuals’ experiences with crime and victimization,
5. Understand and describe ethical dilemmas, both intended and unintended, that cybersecurity efforts, produce for individuals, nations, societies, and the environment,
6. Describe the costs and benefits of producing secure cyber technologies,
7. Understand and describe the global nature of cybersecurity and the way that cybersecurity efforts have produced and inhibited global changes,
8. Describe the role of cybersecurity in defining definitions of appropriate an inappropriate behavior,
9. Describe how cybersecurity produces ideas of progress and modernism.

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Weekly Cyber Free Writes  

For this week’s free write, I would like you to find three jobs in which you are interested (you can use www.indeed.com, www.linkedin.com or any other job search engine). You don’t have to be qualified for these jobs at this moment, just to be interested in them. List the requirements for every job separately and explain how you fulfill them or will fulfill them in the future. Include a timeline of how you are planning to get the necessary skills/certificate(s) or degree(s) that are required. The idea behind this little project is for you to get familiar with the requirements of the job market and to start thinking about them early on. This way, your remaining years in college will be more focused and hopefully more beneficial to you in terms of your future job/career choice.

For this week’s free write, I would like you to think and respond to the following questions. If you were a policy-maker, would you obligate companies with more than 20 employees to implement a minimum set of cybersecurity requirements in the following sectors – 1) company policy, 2) awareness, 3) training, 4) education, 5) technology? What would these requirements be and would you impose fines to the companies that are not compliant with the policy? Why or why not?

This week’s free write requires you to focus again on the part with Cyber Attacks Examples in Engineering Systems. Imagine a disastrous cyber attack similar or even worse than the case studies listed in the module, and describe it. Who/what would be affected by the attack and how? Is it possible that it could have been prevented and in what way? 

For this week’s free write, imagine that you are interviewing people for an information security officer position. List at least 5 questions that you want to ask the potential candidates, explain why these questions are important, and provide the responses that you want to hear in order to offer the job to someone. 

Watch the video and complete the assignment. This will be your free write for the week. Incorporate into your ePortfolio after submitting to Blackboard. For the description of your business plan, consider all of the components mentioned in the video. You should have around 300-350 words. Please, include a word count in the end of your free write.

As you already know, it is very important for leaders to promote personal responsibility of employees about the level of cybersecurity in a company. For this week’s free write, I would like you to imagine you are the CEO of a company and think about what specific rewards and sanctions for employees would you implement to achieve the goal mentioned above? List at least 3 reward and 3 sanction mechanisms and explain why do you think they would be effective. 

Read the following publication by Erik van Ommeren, Martin Borrett and Marinus Kuivenhoven in collaboration with IBM: Staying Ahead in the Cyber Security Game – What matters now.pdf . Select one of the following groups of questions for your weekly free write that you will upload to Blackboard and then post to your ePortfolio (use 250-350 words):

• Do you think that people treasure their physical property more than their personal data in the online space? Propose a strategy that aims to make users more protective of their cyber privacy and aware of possible data breaches and violations. 
• Imagine that you are the owner of a big company. How would you make sure that employees outside of the IT department are also engaged and responsible for applying best practices to cybersecurity? 
• What do you think will be the biggest challenge in cybersecurity in the next 20 years? What do you think will be the most successful counter-measure for this challenge and do you think it will come from individual actions of employees/leaders, corporate practices and policies or federal/state/international agreements and laws?

For this week’s free write, you will go to the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and click on the Press Releases section (https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ccips/ccips-press-releases-2019). I want you to find 10 cybercrime cases of the same kind (e.g. cyber frauds, hacking, theft of secrets, etc.), post the links, and provide the following information about the offenders in each case: gender, age, country of origin/residence. Do you find any patterns? How would you explain them?

Your free write for the week will be to respond to the questions in the video and upload the file to Blackboard. Then, include them in your ePortfolio. You should have 250-350 words.

Your free write for this week will be to respond to the following questions. Use between 250-350 words and don’t forget to include in your ePortfolios. 

Imagine the world 20 years from now. 

• What do you think would be the biggest cybersecurity challenge in 2040?
• How would you advise national and supranational policy makers to react to this challenge?
• What specific strategy (legislation, partnerships, or/and other actions) would be needed to mitigate the issue? 

Your free write for this week will be to respond to the following questions. Use between 250-350 words and don’t forget to include in your ePortfolios. 

Imagine the world 20 years from now. 

• What do you think would be the biggest cybersecurity challenge in 2040?
• How would you advise national and supranational policy makers to react to this challenge?
• What specific strategy (legislation, partnerships, or/and other actions) would be needed to mitigate the issue? 

For this week, you should find a case involving social engineering. Briefly describe the case and explain:

• What psychological mechanism was used to manipulate the user? 
• Who benefited from this manipulation and how? 
• What were the consequences from the manipulation for the user?
• What prevention mechanisms that would have protected the user would you suggest?

The free write should be between 250 and 350 words. After you submit it to Blackboard, incorporate into your ePortfolio. Please, include a word count in the end.

Midterm Group Video Project

For the group project, each team member had an important role to play when it came to the development of this project. We all had different ways in researching out topics and putting them together for the final product. Working in a team had it ups and downs, not all group members communicated of did there part respectively but the overall product turned out to be great.