Cybersecurity and the Social Sciences (CYSE 201S)
Explain how the principles of science relate to cybersecurity.
The principles of science can relate to cybersecurity in many ways. For example, hacking isn’t objectively bad, but what you do while hacking can lead to issues that can be looked at through a subjective lens. As hacking is simply gaining access to a system that you weren’t meant to access, this can be done in ethical or malicious ways. I don’t really believe that Empiricism relates to cybersecurity as it is a digital thing. We can obviously “see” systems set up to provide cybersecurity, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it is something we can use our senses to judge. Determinism plays the largest part in cybersecurity as cybersecurity arose out of need to protect systems from nefarious actors. The experience that businesses or individuals have had with others accessing their systems without their consent lead to the need for cybersecurity to prevent these things from happening in the future. Regarding Ethical Neutrality, I also think this can relate to cybersecurity in a large way. Cybersecurity systems should simply act in the same way that physical security acts, for example, a gate or fence to keep someone out. Cybersecurity systems should do no more than keep someone from accessing a system. When these systems collect additional information to use for other purposes, it loses its ethical core. Parsimony could go along with this as cybersecurity should be kept as simple as possible to achieve its overarching goal.