Cybersecurity for Everyone . Lecture 2

Cybersecurity for Everyone . Lecture 2
Hi, my name's Dr. Charles Harry from the University of Maryland, and this is Cyber Security For Everyone, The Fundamentals. Cyber security is one of these topics that a lot of people talk about; you hear it on the news, you hear maybe even some of your friends talking about it as they read some article in the newspaper. The question is, what are we talking about? What is cyber security? This question, this fundamental question is an area that frankly, many of us are confused about. How can we maybe demystify this subject? That's the goal of this course. We will talk about what do we mean by cyber security? Maybe the first place that we should focus on, is really a definition. What do we mean by cyber security? It's usually a good place to start. The way I like to think about cyber security is to break it down into individual words. Let's define those words, and maybe we can get a better way to think about this problem before we start our long journey on talking about the threat actors that are out there, the Internet, all the various tools and techniques that hackers use. Let's start off with the very first word, cyber. What do we mean by cyber? If we take a look adjusted, your normal dictionary, something like the Webster's Dictionary. We get some definition that looks like this, of relating to or involving computers or computer networks. That sounds reasonable. Because when we think about cyber, we tend to think of the person in their parents basement with the hoodie over their head, working away on their laptop, some brilliant hacker. Of course, cyber has to be about technology. Is it only about the technology? That's the question. In fact, when you take a look at some of the historical representations and definitions of cyber, we get a slightly different view. Let's define the term cyber. How is cyber different than other terms that we often hear? Terms like information assurance or information security, or even things like cybernetics, or computer security, or something is generic as IT security. How is cyber different? If we actually explore this term, if we explore it and take look at some of its historical roots, we start to figure out that cyber is actually something a little bit broader than just the technology. Cyber really evolves historically, from this larger field. The larger field was often termed way back in the 1940s, cybernetics, which dealt with the field of controlling communications theory, whether in machine or in the animal. That sounds like a really, really strange quote, but what we're talking about here is not just about technology, not just about the machine. We're also talking about the animal or the people. This term, starting all the way back in 1948, evolves and morphs itself over the years. Eventually becomes popularized in a novel Neuromancer then maybe some of you have actually read or had the opportunity to review in the past. But this ability to blend technology with people is what starts to make cyber different than IT security or computer security. It's broader. It's this confluence between technology, human beings, and human organizations that really make it different. That's why we talk about cyber instead of IT security or computer security. It's different. It's about this complex system and this interplay between technology, people, and organizations. Yes, cyber is about technology. That's something that we're going to talk a lot about through this course. We have to talk about things like laptops, application servers, databases, smartphones, sensors, networks, and even autonomous cars. Something that we're looking forward to over the next 10 to 15 years. But cyber is also about the humans. It's not simply about technology. It's about the hobbyists, the people who just enjoy playing around with technology. It's about the social activists that are out there who might want to leverage computers and their insight into organizations, how to advance their personal agenda and their organization's agenda. It's also about criminal syndicates who want to leverage technology and their insights about people in their failings in order to obtain more money....