Week 1: The career that appeals the most to me is security provision. I always had an interest in taking things apart and figuring out how something works. Therefore, I would really enjoy reverse engineering a malicious program and developing software to mitigate against it. The career that least appeals to me is investigating. I never had an interest in criminology so this aspect of cybersecurity is the least interesting to me.

Week 2: There are four principles of science: research questions, hypotheses, independent variables, and dependent variables. These principles relate to cybersecurity because one of the disciplines in cybersecurity is social science. So looking at cybersecurity through a social science lens will provide many questions such as “What will motivate a computer user in clicking on a spam email link?”

Week 3: Researchers can use the information about data breaches at privacyrights.org by keeping up to date about current issues. There are multiple articles that give out good information about privacy laws in the state that the researcher is interested in investigating. There’s an article called “Data Breach Notification in the United States and Territories”. It provides a map of the United States and depending on the state the researcher clicks on it provides the privacy law for that state.

Week 4: Every level of Abrahams Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” is easily relatable to technology. My girlfriend lives in texas while I am stationed out here in San Diego. Whenever I lose my phone or someone hides it for a prank at work I tend to get frustrated and angry. I spend the entire day looking for it rather than just enjoying what’s in front of me. I also use a lot of public networks since I do not have internet where I live. Therefore I refuse to use the public internet if my VPN starts to act up because I know it’s unsafe to continue. Because I am in a long distant relationship for the next three months I constantly use technology like video chats, text messages, and phone calls to stay in contact with my girlfriend. Me being able to take online classes gives me an intense feeling of accomplishment. Especially since I am in the military and would not be able to take in-person classes. Finally, technology helps me achieve my full potential because I take photos as a hobby. I can take photos, upload them and edit them to create a wonderful photo album.

Week 5: (7) I did not like the argument that Herallives put out about boredom. It did not make any since of how parents that work from home cannot supervise their children. Most devices have parental controls and kids that are to young to realize a pervert would be interested in video games or Youtube. (6) The political argument where “hackers” cyberbullied politicians and police support profiles are considered I hacks. They would be normal computer users that have a basic knowledge of using a web browser. (5) The article about stealing information from millions of Linkedin users is not about entertainment. The hacker clearly has a motive behind what he has done and it was money. (4) I agree with the article about revenge pornagaphy. Police and cyber-experts need to crack on videos and photos being leaked on the internet. I can imagined how scaring that would be. (3) I liked the article about recognition. Bradley Niblock was definitly looking for attention and disrupt an impotant election in the process. (2) I enjoyed the motivations behind hackers. Its well researched and it provides good sitistics on why hackers do what they do. (1) I also enjoyed reading on what malicious users do with the money they steal. This article is also well researched and I liked it better than number two because it provides numbers to back up the research.

Week 6: The fake websites I will be talking about are real phishing attempts that I keep receiving on my phone. The first one is a text message that posses as PayPal. it tells me that my account has been locked and tells me to click on the link to unlock the account. The URL is t.co/vUavEJkXWA. The real PayPal URL is paypal.com and they would never contact me by text message. The second phishing attempt is from a phisher posing as Amazon. It tells me that my amazon account has been experiencing unusual activity and I need to verify my information. It gives me a link https://gsooewg.shop/G9QXGgu. The actual amazon URL is amazon.com and they would also not contact me for unusual activity over a text message. The last phishing attempt is from someone who says they are from Cash App. It asks me to verify my credit card saying there was suspicious activity. The URL was https://biz.comnstantcontactsites.com. However, I never set up a cash app account but the actual URL is cash.app.

Week 7:

Week 8: The media influences our understanding of cybersecurity by making it look pleasing to the eye, dramatic, and fast pace. Hacking in the real world does not have the flashy videos and pictures on the screen as Holywood depicts it. Most of the hacking is done in a command-line operating system. Holywood also depicts it as something that is dramatic. This makes sense because if Holywood tries to film hacking as it is in the real world it would be a very long movie of someone sitting at a computer typing complicated commands in a Linux OS. Lastly, Hollywood makes it seem like hacking can be a one-day exploit but in reality, most of the hacking is recon. Searching and taking notes of certain lines of code that could possibly be exploited.

Week 10 Part 1: The article “Social Cybersecurity: An Emerging National Security Requirement” talks about the shift in threat from physical to cyber. In the cyber domain, it is an ongoing battlefield. Not only are hackers trying to hack into computers to steal information, but to divide society, culture, and values through influences by the use of the internet. It is interesting how we had the most kinetic energy warfare in the last century and now we have shifted our warfare strategies once again to information warfare. We had too big shifts in our warfare strategy in the last 100 years than we ever did in human history. Warfare is no longer physical, this allows there to be hardly any human casualties. I’m in favor of this because it allows a nation’s citizens to live their lives and their wives and parents no longer have to mourn for their lost ones.

Week 10 Part 2: The video What Does a Cyber Analysis Do? Salaries, Skills, and Job Outlook by Nicole Enesse describe many aspects of the job. The many tasks of being a cyber analyst relate to social behavior. For example, a cyber analyst has to write reports on security breaches and they would give training to computer users to not be as gullible. The cyber analysis also does virus scans on computers that became victims of poor cyber hygiene if someone were to click on a link in an unknown email.

Week 11 Part 1: The sample letter that informs customers of a data breach at a company called Glass Washer Parts relates to social science theories by showing the motivation of the hacker upon why he would hack the server and it shows that the victims did not have knowledge about the data breach. The motivation for the malicious user is to gain as much credit card information as possible so they can use it for their own personal gain while the victims have not realized it until it is too late. The two economic theories that relate to this sample letter is rational choice and Laissez-Fare economic theory. The rational choice theory is where a business makes decisions based on its own interest. Their interest is to partner with a third-party company that provides them with the tools for the Glass Washer Parts website. In result, led to a data breach. Also, this letter relates to Laissez-Fare economic theory because the government stepped in to protect the customer’s rights to privacy.

Week 12: The first out of five cyber offenses that I think is important is recording a VoIP call without consent. I believe this is a huge invasion of privacy. The second illegal internet activity is collecting information about children. This is very creepy and needs to be regulated because children are too innocent to be exposed to all the dangers in the world. The third one is using unofficial streaming services. People worked hard to develop TV shows and movies so they deserve every bit of dollar that people pay. Getting access to the movie for free is like stealing a physical DVD. The fourth offense is using other people’s networks. Again this can be an invasion of people’s privacy and it can go as far as stealing the owner’s bandwidth. The fifth offense is bullying and trolling on the internet. It should not go as far as to arrest the bully or troller but there should be regulations on the social media website and ban the individual and not just the account.

Week 13: The speaker in the video Digital Forensics | Davin Teo | TEDxHongKongSalon pathway to his career is that he got picked to set up a network in an accounting company and realized that he enjoys being an IT. He found an opportunity through an email to make a team for digital forensics when it was a new concept. To me, this was an interesting time when everything that involved computers was still being defined. There were many opportunities to make breakthroughs in the IT field. New techniques were being developed by anyone who is willing to do the research and has the time to develop them.