Cybersecurity Society

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Cybersecurity is a great human rights issue of our time, necessary for everything from privacy and personal safety to national security and global economy stability. What happens online no longer stays online. Ransomware attacks on hospitals prevent people from receiving health care. Disruptions of digital communication systems are now disruptions of our food supply and energy systems. Solutions are available to implement, but marked by conflicting values and political challenges, all in the context of complex, constantly changing technologies. Cybersecurity attacks are as human as they are technical. Social engineering techniques exploit human emotions to trick people, sometimes with acute political, personal, or financial consequences. Ethical questions abound, such as the conditions under which security researchers infiltrate systems, the choices whistleblowers make about disclosing conditions of government surveillance, government policies about when to disclose a discovered vulnerability to a technology company to protect critical infrastructure versus withholding the knowledge to enable cyber weapons, and the legality and ethics of companies hacking back as part of defending systems. Students in the Cybersecurity and Society course will gain: 1. Sociotechnical Thinking - Explore cybersecurity entanglements with society through real life case studies and theoretical frameworks from Science & Technology Studies (STS); 2. Topical Cybersecurity Knowledge - Learn about the foundational principles, frameworks, technical infrastructures, and institutions at the heart of cybersecurity solutions; 3. Ethical Stances - Analyze the complex ethical dilemmas at the core of most cybersecurity governance debates, such as battles over encryption that mediate between cyber offense and law enforcement versus cyber defense and critical infrastructure protection; and 4. A Technological Mindset for analyzing complex and emerging technologies - such as quantum computing, blockchain, artificial intelligence, cyber-brain interfaces, and the Internet of Things, that are creating new cybersecurity and society entanglements.