Among the social security careers I found interesting, I decided to further my research about how professionals within the cyber security field depend on social science research and practices. Researchers and practitioners of social science make important contributions to the protection of private information and research from cybercriminals. The job of social scientists requires knowledge of how to utilize these practices to create a safe cyber economy. An example of these careers are Certified Ethical Hackers, Certified Information Security Managers,
Certified ethical hackers are professionals that have a strong background in hacking. They implement the same routines that illegal hackers do, which has them work much harder in the way that they protect our information. This knowledge of hacking helps them to better their technology to best hackers. “Ethical hackers use their knowledge to secure and improve the technology of organizations. They provide an essential service to these organizations by looking for vulnerabilities that can lead to a security breach. An ethical hacker reports the identified vulnerabilities to the organization. Additionally, they provide remediation advice. In many cases, with the organization’s consent, the ethical hacker performs a re-test to ensure the vulnerabilities are fully resolved.” (What is ethical Hacking, 2022 Synopsys Inc.) We can directly relate this to the way that hackers choose to commit these cybercrimes, whether they are red, white, or gray hat hackers it doesn’t make a difference in terms of the job of a certified ethical hacker. They mimic these patterns and the information that is proven to be most vulnerable.
Since social media is one of the most vulnerable platforms to hackers, Instagram has implemented two-step authentication by having its users verify their accounts by phone number and email address. The lack of verification left lots of accounts open to hackers. Certified hackers give these findings to organizations to improve their systems and make them a safer environment. In this process, I believe that we can see the research process that can be read about in chapter 3 of Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices (Bhattacherjee, A. 2012). A social scientist’s research process involves every tedious step involved in establishing which of an organization’s private information is vulnerable to cybercriminals.
Within Certified Information Security Managers there are Information/privacy risk consultants. “The CISM teaches fundamental risk assessment skills invaluable to an information and privacy risk consultant. Documentation and policy adherence is a large part of what this job requires and the CISM teaches you how to stay in control of these systems.” (Common CISM Job Titles, Messina July 2022) This domain of social science focuses on identifying the risk within the digital world. You can take into account the theoretical propositions from chapter 6 (Bhattacherjee, A. 2012) where constructs such as a person’s age, weight, or a firm’s size are easy to calculate in terms of risk assessment as well. Whereas the constructs of creativity, prejudice, or alienation are noticeably harder to measure.
This shows how social science practices are put into play daily by cybersecurity professionals. Professionals depend on research to execute their jobs with accurate and relevant information. The practices and research mentioned in Bhattacherjee’s Social Science Research: Principles, methods, and practices help us to find out how the information is gathered, and the scale of importance that each piece of data holds.
References
“What Is Ethical Hacking and How Does It Work?” Synopsys, https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-ethical-hacking.html.
Bhattacherjee, A. (2012).
Social science research: Principles, methods, practices
Messina, Graeme. “Common CISM Job Titles [Updated 2022].” Infosec Resources, Infosec Resources, 12 July 2022, https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/certification/common-cism-job-titles/.