Cybersecurity is becoming one of the fastest growing fields in the world. The interest is in the industry because you can work remotely for a lot of the options available. The companies are willing to pay higher wages and give more benefits because they are in dire need of workers. The threat of cyber attacks is always growing, and if a company doesn’t have the resources to protect themselves, sooner or later someone will expose their weakness. The cybersecurity field is in the need for a lot of workers. Fortune.com reports that companies are “desperate” for workers, and that the cybersecurity field has over “700,000” open jobs (Lake 2022). The number of students studying cybersecurity is increasing, but so are the job openings with the ever-changing circumstances and technology. Cybersecurity is one of the most popular choices for adults that are going back to school. People from all sorts of backgrounds are heading into the cybersecurity field in hopes of making more money. This brings me to my main point about how people from other backgrounds joining the cybersecurity field are extremely important.
Social science is becoming more and more relevant to the cybersecurity industry as more studies are conducted. For far too long people have been trying to predict what attacks are coming from a technology standpoint, when they need to also look at the social standpoint. Understanding and analyzing people’s behaviors and motives that typically result in cybercrimes is becoming a better way to predict when and how they will occur. You know it must be a serious way to predict crimes when the government opens a new department to strictly study the human behavior in cybersecurity to predict attacks. The world is slowly starting to realize how important the cyberspace is going to be in future conflicts, and everyone needs to be educated on how to best prepare themselves.
An example of a job field in the cybersecurity field would be a Security Architect. The specific job title I am looking into would be an Information Security Architect. The other jobs in the Security Architect field all do similar jobs, but their job just focuses on different aspects of the security. The Security Architect field is the part I would like to focus on. Primarily because they have the ability to manage people and to know how to organize them. Someone in this position needs to understand some idea of social science in order to organize his team correctly. They need to also understand “how to implement security planning into broader business objectives and be able to build a longer lasting security and risk-based culture to protect the organization” (Sans). The reason that statement is so important to this course is because it clearly mentions that you need to have a “Risk-based” culture, and the best way to do that is by using social science. Predicting risks is a challenge that understanding the way people behave can help with. As Maalem states the motives, “curiosity or notoriety” usually pertain to novice hackers, “revenge or financial benefits” usually pertain to “Cyber-punks that have a medium skill level”, and “purely financial” pertain to the people with “very high capabilities” (Maalem 2020). They have been using social science to figure out which people are more likely to commit which crimes, and why.
The reason this is so important is because it can change the field from one that hopes they are prepared from attacks to one that finds the culprits before they even attack and can act quickly to end the threats. Social science is the defining factor that connects humans to machines. The motives and behaviors of these hackers is what separates them from just being another bot trying to break into a server. It needs to be thoroughly investigated to make the internet and networks more secure for the people unable or unwilling to protect themselves. Too many people are being taken advantage of by younger people that know how to trick people. That is why education systems are implementing coding classes into middle schools and high schools. They need to understand the threats of the cyberspace before they get taken advantage of. Social science is a great way to understand how people think, regardless of using it in technology or not, and more people need to understand the human side of technology.
Sources
Carley, K. M. (2020). Social cybersecurity: an emerging science. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 26(4), 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-020-09322-9
Maalem Lahcen, R. A., Caulkins, B., Mohapatra, R., & Kumar, M. (2020). Review and insight on the behavioral aspects of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-020-00050-w
Ahmed, O. S., & Al, E. (2021). Teacher’s awareness to develop student cyber security: A Case Study. Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education (TURCOMAT), 12(10), 5148–5156. https://doi.org/10.17762/turcomat.v12i10.5297
Security Architect | CISA. (n.d.). Www.cisa.gov. https://www.cisa.gov/security-architect
Companies are desperate for cybersecurity workers—More than 700K positions need to be filled. (2022). Fortune. Retrieved December 14, 2022, from https://fortune.com/education/articles/companies-are-desperate-for-cybersecurity-workers-more-than-700k-positions-need-to-be-filled/
20 Coolest Cyber Security Careers | SANS Institute. (n.d.). Www.sans.org. https://www.sans.org/cybersecurity-careers/20-coolest-cyber-security-careers/