Week 1 – Top Careers

After reading the work, a few interesting careers potentially combining social sciences and cybersecurity jumped out to me.

     The first thought I had was private security from a cybersecurity standpoint. Nowadays we have a lot of older generation people interacting with technology that is advancing at a breakneck pace.  In the cybersecurity world there are already services for corporations to outsource their cybersecurity, so why shouldn’t private citizens be able to do the same thing?  I’m sure this already happens, and it would be an interesting career to be say, Ryan Gosling’s private cybersecurity specialist.

     Data science and cybersecurity go hand in hand.  Aspects of cybersecurity already involve collecting data to form baseline activity profiles for networks.  Baseline profiles are used to detect intrusions or abnormal activity on the network and warn against potentially malicious activity.

     Criminal Justice is one of the most obvious marriages of cybersecurity and political science.  Police, military, and the government all have applications of Criminal Justice in a cybersecurity field.

Week 2 – Empiricism and Cybersecurity

Empirical data seeks to remove the element of human error from scientific research.  Bias, even with empirical studies, is difficult to completely remove from the interpretation of data, but if the data is empirical, then it can tell no lie. 

In cybersecurity, collecting baseline patterns on usage activity is a strategy used to secure a network.  This baseline activity is often used in Intrusion Detection, or prevention, systems to determine abnormal activity over the network.  For example, having a spike in activity in upload speeds to an unknown destination on a network could mean that someone is sending off data they shouldn’t be.  Without the empirical data of the baseline, and the traffic monitoring systems in place, this kind of network activity would go unnoticed.