The Cybersecurity job I have chosen to write about is cyber crime investigations. The main social science being used in this job is of course criminology, also known as the study of how and why a crime happened, those who are behind the crime that happened, and how our society might react to said incident.
From the article “A Framework for Cyber Crime Investigation,” by Okutan and Cebi, we see them use this idea of social science where they have devoted time to listing all known types of cyber crimes which include malware and phishing, but also as wide as to include cyberterrorism and cyber laundering, which are lesser known. This article investigated something to either uncover the criminal, why or how the crime happened, and how our society reacted to a cyber crime. Money laundering is something widely understood, and it is translated into the cyber world through the use of credit card fraud and business solicitation compromises. Due to the susceptibility of digital information to things like magnetic or electric fields, or the ease with which this data can be deleted on purpose or on accident, makes collection of evidence particularly difficult. The authors mention this protocol: “In existing, deleted, unallocated space, file and word searching should be done. Web process, link file, print spool file should be examined. Signature analysis and hash analysis should be checked.” The main note is that you preserve the original evidence and make a copy of it in order to actually perform forensic work on the evidence.
From the second article “An Extended Model of Cybercrime Investigations” we see the use of social science to predict how a cyber criminal might try and breach a system by reconstructing the crime. The author Seamus O Ciardhuain says, “Reconstruction involves bringing together the outputs from the earlier parts of the process, and any other relevant information which investigators may have obtained, to provide a detailed account of the events and actions at the crime scene. This leads to reporting and presentation.” Through this we also see them not only predict how a cyber crime might happen but also how a criminal might operate in their attempts to commit cyber crimes.
Last but not least my last article is “Investigating and Prosecuting Cyber Crime: Forensic Dependencies and Barriers to Justice” by Cameron S. D. Brown. From my last article we once again see the use of social science, they look into how society and or the public might react to this type of situation and how they might be able to stop it from getting out of hand, sometimes withholding information can be better for society, not always but sometimes it can be. This article specifically mentions a case of cyber stalking where a college student named Mary was being sent erotic messages from a stalker and that the messages were coming from overseas websites but were an unknown person. The parents of the victim were reluctant to report the crime because they didn’t want their daughter to be stigmatized and also because they doubted the police had the necessary tools to track down an anonymous overseas stalker. The general underreporting of cyber crimes in general makes it hard to know true data about how many crimes are truly being committed by these anonymous assailants.
In conclusion we see the use of social science many times throughout this cyber security job, though not the only one to, many other cyber security jobs also use a lot of social science in their daily jobs given how vulnerable we really are on the internet, those in cyber security must forge the path towards a safer space from hackers for all.