The Information Security Institute is pleased to share the news of our acquaintance with Professor Kathleen M Carley, who is a recognized expert in the field of cybersecurity and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2019, Dr. Carley introduced the expression “Social Cybersecurity”, which has now become a stand alone scientific field. Olga Panchenko from the Institute of Information Security interviewed Kathleen to reveal serious interdisciplinary interests in the fight against growing informational threats. In the first interview, Dr. Kathleen M Carley shared her research on social cybersecurity.
More and more information security experts have been talking about “social cybersecurity” lately. Specialists in this field stand out for their interdisciplinary approach, which includes many sciences, such as sociology, politics, various computer sciences, journalism, economics, advocacy and others. They draw conclusions about how people cope with threats on the Internet and how people’s behavior can be influenced.
A few points that have been highlighted by Professor Kathleen M Carley during the interview:
The problems with public cybersecurity are being discussed in the US National Academy of Science, and cover a wide range of issues it is said that the issue of social cyber security will be the main problem of the next 10 years. Social cybersecurity is a separate discipline and not the same as cybersecurity. Social cybersecurity solves problems about influencing humans through online interaction, Cybersecurity solves problems about compromising machines or data. Social cybersecurity requires different methods, theoretical foundations and data, and requires an interdisciplinary focus on social, communication, psychology, marketing, political science, data and computer science using methodologies such as NLP, machine learning, and social network analysis. Social cybersecurity methods in certain situation can help people and companies owned by investors to not become victims of the information war.
Professor states, that the field of social cybersecurity is developing, more and more research and conferences are devoted to it. Carley underlines that its very important to build a scientific community around this field and teach groups and teams of professionals social cybersecurity methods to be able to protect themselves and others. Carley also shared a vision for the future of social cybersecurity, which she thinks there will be many new international laws implemented in order to fight disinformation and untrue materials online.
After analyzing the interview with the professor, the experts of the Institute of Information Security agreed that in the Western world it is finally becoming more and more obvious that with the help of just cybersecurity all information security problems just can not be solved, problems that challenge businesses, representatives of organizations, celebrities, politics and government structures. To solve those tasks, an interdisciplinary approach is needed, which will combine experiences from different fields, such as cybersecurity, jurisprudence, sociology, psychology and other.
Thus, we can conclude that an interdisciplinary approach is an effective way to counter the growing information threats in the XXI century, and this will become the foundation for new information security strategies and methodology that will be implemented in Europe and the United States for the next 10 years.
