• Many technological and technical challenges affect cybersecurity.

• However, human actions (or inactions) can sometimes pose the largest risks.

• One problem: we often don’t “see the world” the same way. For a start, what does “cybersecurity” actually mean? How is it related to “cyberthreat,” “cybercrime,” etc.?

• Dictionaries, glossaries and other sources tell you what words/phrases are supposed to mean, but may not accurately reflect what they actually mean, or how they are used in practice.

Introduction

Towards better understanding Cybersecurity:or are "Cyberspace" and "Cyber Space" the same?

Stuart Madnick1, Nazli Choucri1, Steven Camina1, Wei Lee Woon2

1Massachusetts Institute of Technology; 2Masdar Institute of Science and Technology

• To demonstrate this point, consider the case of “cyberspace” vs “cyber space”

• It might be assumed that “cyberspace” and “cyber space” are essentially the same word, with just a minor variation in punctuation. But is this necessarily true?

Objectives

Discussion

• The taxonomies above are very different.• Possible reasons:o Authors of papers in different fields use

different termso Usage of terms vary across geographical

regionso Different words may have been favored in

different time periods

• Lots of scope for future research, including:o Detailed study of reasons behind

observed differences (we do know some)o Different “seed terms” (e.g.,

“cyberthreat”)o Alternative text databases/source typeso Different taxonomy generation algorithmso “Face validity” via consultation with

domain experts

• We have developed techniques for automatically generating taxonomies for selected “seed terms” using large document repositories, such as Compendex and Inspec, based on co-occurrence.

• These taxonomies reflect relationship amongst terms, and help to elucidate broad usage patterns.

• We can use this to test the previous assumption - if “cyberspace” and “cyber space” are indeed the same, we expect roughly similar taxonomies.

Method

Acknowledgements: This work was supported, in part, by the MIT-Harvard “Explorations in Cyber International Relations” (ECIR) Project, which is funded by the Office of Naval Research under award number N00014-09-1-0597. Any opinion or findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.

“Cyberspace” “Cyber Space”