Nathan Guman
CYSE 201S Cyber Security and Social Science
Week 10 Journal Entry
Read this and write a journal entry summarizing your response to the article on social cybersecurity
“Social cybersecurity is an emerging scientific area focused on the science to characterize, understand, and forecast cyber-mediated changes in human behavior, social, cultural, and political outcomes, and to build the cyber-infrastructure needed for society to persist in its essential character in a cyber-mediated information environment under changing conditions, actual or imminent social cyber-threats (Beskow).” In the article, the author described social cybersecurity and how it is important for the US military to develop the cyber tools needed to conduct operations in cyberspace. Specifically, ensuring cyberspace can be used to build trust, credibility, and opportunity to influence or counter influence people behaviors. The author points out Social cybersecurity is a newer threat in that physical presence is not required to influence adversaries. I appreciated his mention of bots for this purpose as it can artificially inflate the significance of some online discourse resulting in decision makers believing certain ideas are popular or relevant. “We as military leaders must understand that one of the information blitzkrieg lines of effort will be to drive a wedge of distrust between us and the society we defend as well as civil leadership that leads us. An untrusted institution will be underfunded, underused, and underperforming (Beskow).”
References:
Beskow, David M. Lt. Col, US Army. “Social Cybersecurity an Emerging National Security Requirement.” Army University Press, www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Mar-Apr-2019/117-Cybersecurity/b/.