Explain how the principles of science relate to cybersecurity.

My understanding of this prompt is to describe how we use the scientific method to research the field of cybersecurity.

  • Observation– One of the first steps in establishing cybersecurity is first to identify the need for cybersecurity. Companies or just everyday people can see what happens all over the world with people accessing information that they were not supposed to. If you want your information to be secure whether you’re running a business or just saving precious photos to your computer, you have to understand that people may be able to access whatever you have saved.
  • Question- The next logical step is to ask the question “how can I prevent this from happening?”. The way that this can relate to cybersecurity is by conducting research into how cyber-attacks are performed and how they are accomplished/defended against.
  • Hypothesis-To develop a hypothesis you would need to come up with a testable question. There are many threat hunting hypotheses that could be investigated. If you think that someone has sabotaged your website by introducing a certain type of malware, or someone has leaked your information to a competitor or just to the public you could start there.
  • Experiment-The following process that should be followed is developing an experiment to test your hypothesis. For a malware infection, you could run a scan on your computer/website to determine if there is something that is harming your computer/website. If you wanted to test the strength of your security system you could hire an ethical hacker to try to hack into your system to determine any weak points.
  • Conclusion-After all of this, you have the empirical data that supports or refutes your hypothesis.
  • Result-The “final” chapter of this is to determine what to do with the empirical data you gathered from your experiment. If your hypothesis was correct, then you should implement some form of security to prevent things like that from happening again. If your hypothesis was incorrect then you would continue the cycle and develop another hypothesis and repeat the process to determine the “how” and “why”.

All in all, these scientific principles are used in the cyber security field to determine the need for certain security measures and develop countermeasures.