The relevance of social science to the cybersecurity discourse

Presented at Diana Initiative 2019, Aug. 10, 2019, 10 a.m. (60 minutes)

While cyberattacks and cybersecurity may involve technical aspects, the offenders, defenders, and victims are human. Cybercrime is a broader societal problem and thus the social sciences can, and should, be included in discussions of cyberattacks and cybersecurity in both the research and education domains. This talk shares how social science has been used in research to understand adversarial movement, decision-making, adaptation, and group dynamics. It then discusses how it has been blended with data analytic techniques to delve into these areas further. On the education front, this talk shares how hands-on projects can expose students across both the hard and social sciences to areas of critical infrastructure cybersecurity, adversarial mindsets, and social engineering.


Presenters:

  • Aunshul Rege - Associate Professor at Temple University
    Aunshul Rege, PhD, is an Associate Professor with the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University, USA. She holds a PhD and MA in Criminal Justice, an MA and BA in Criminology, and a BSc in Computer Science. She has been researching proactive cybersecurity in the context of cybercrimes against critical infrastructures for over 10 years. Specifically, her National Science Foundation funded (CAREER, CPS, EAGER) research examines adversarial and defender behavior, decision-making, adaptations, modus operandi, and group dynamics. Her has been published in the Journal of Information Warfare, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the Security Journal, and the IEEE Intelligent Systems. Dr. Rege is also passionate about educating the next generation workforce across the social and hard sciences about the relevance of the human factor in cybersecurity through experiential learning.

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