At Old Dominion University, there are dozens of majors offered for students to pursue Bachelors or Masters degrees in. I currently study Computer Science, a field that is very closely related to cybersecurity. However, almost all of the other majors offered at ODU deal with or relate to cybersecurity in one way or another. These include accounting, psychology, criminal justice, and health service administration.

Majors like accounting and health service administration most obviously deal with cybersecurity due to the sensitive information they handle. For accountants, you are not only handling finances, but you are likely also handling social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and so on. That same information is being handled by healthcare administrators. This information in the wrong hands could very easily be used for criminal purposes. It is crucial that these industries prioritize cybersecurity in an increasingly online world.

Criminal justice also deals with some sensitive information, but the relationship between criminal justice and cybersecurity goes even deeper. Many cybersecurity crimes require prosecution, which is where criminal justice comes in. More importantly, as technology develops, the need to determine what is and is not legal becomes important as well. While criminal justice majors likely would not deal with the legal side of the issues directly, they do still play a role in determining and catching cyber criminals.

Finally, we have psychology. The connection between psychology and cybersecurity might not seem obvious at first: how do emotions relate to computers? However, many of the ‘tools’ hackers use to exploit their victims are not on the computer. Instead, hackers know how to take advantage of user’s fears or concerns via manipulation. This is most commonly seen in phishing attacks. If the attacker sends an urgent email from a seemingly-trusted source, the user is more likely to react to the urgency and want to click on a link or respond without thinking about it. In the majority of common cyber crimes, it just takes knowledge of basic human emotions, reactions, and patterns to know how to get what you want from a victim.

Looking at this list, it is extremely easy to see how cybersecurity is an important field to many industries. The risks of inadequate cybersecurity goes beyond the computer and cyberspace. It bleeds into real life and has material consequences for the victims involved, their friends and family, and the community at large. Weak cybersecurity puts distrust in crucial systems that we rely on to live today and would has lasting long-term effects beyond the single crime that started it all.