Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity, or the discipline of protecting information environments, generally involves three fundamental considerations: protecting and ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and the information environments it exists within. However, the protection of information resources is a complex one, addressing not only an evolving technology infrastructure and dynamic threat environment but also the capabilities and procedures needed to develop, implement, and administer such effective security measures in a wide range of operational frameworks and situations. Cybersecurity, therefore, is an interdisciplinary field of both practice and study.

As a discipline, cybersecurity can be traced back to Willis Ware’s 1967 monograph Security and Privacy in Computer Systems, which outlined the potential security vulnerabilities and other considerations associated with multiuse, resource-sharing systems. Since that time, the protection of information resources as a professional and academic discipline has evolved in parallel with information and communications technologies (ICT), from protecting single computers and the data resident on them during the 1970s and 1980s, to the client-server computing environments of the 1990s, and now to the decentralized and mobile ad hoc network environments of the 2000s.

As the diversity of the discipline evolved, computer security (protecting single computers and their information) became transformed into information security (protecting computers, information, and the networks connecting them) and then information assurance, which helped provide critical infrastructure protection in recognition of how networked ICTs became a critical, foundational platform for modern society. Since the early 2000s, however, the function of protecting information environments has become known as cybersecurity—with the cyber prefix a nod to the future technologies envisioned by novelist William Gibson. However, the term also reflects the reality that information protection considerations and activities are a vital component of government, corporate, and personal information practices and encompass a wide array of functional and conceptual fields beyond simply technical actions taken by a single responsible computer user or talented engineer.

According to a survey prepared for the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS) in 2013, 556 million people per year are becoming victims of cybercrime, 1.5 million per hour, 18 people per second; and with an annual price of $110 billion, cybercrime costs the world significantly more than the global black markets in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin combined. Therefore, the need for quality cybersecurity education is a direct consequence of the need for effective cybersecurity professionals working to protect the many information resources that underpin modern society.

In recognition of the need for such robustly qualified practitioners, the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a U.S. government effort designed to improve the behavior, skills, and knowledge of all computer users, was created to help provide a safer and more secure cyberspace. Other efforts focused on improving the education and training of cybersecurity practitioners include the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberWatch initiative pertaining to community college cybersecurity education program improvements and the National Security Agency’s Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) designation to recognize academic institutions providing superior education in a wide array of cybersecurity and cybersecurity-related disciplines.

Developing a competent professional workforce to address these many considerations requires a unique, if not hybrid, approach to knowledge transfer. Given the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity, it is essential that cybersecurity practitioners have not only a basic understanding of technology and technology security practices but also the necessary skills to apply that knowledge to practical situations effectively.

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