This article offers an interesting perspective on cybercrimes. The author descri

Question

This article offers an interesting perspective on cybercrimes. The author describes a new strategy to defend against online criminals. The strategy is to get into the heads of the hackers and users who are the victims. This is much different than the usual way of dealing with this issue. The traditional strategy is to depend solely on computer scientist to create software to protect against attack, but this has proven to be limited in its capabilities. The strategy discussed in the article is to understand the human side of cybercrime. We need to know why users respond to certain plots that the criminals use and why password security is often compromised. It turns out that a lot of password vulnerabilities has to do with unproven password policies enforced by companies that are not compatible with human behavior. One suggestion is a game that acts as a password. There is also studies being done to understand the human side of the cyber criminals. The more we understand their world the better we can protect ourselves from it. Interestingly, the hackers are very good at using psychological strategies to take advantage of their victims. What ideas do you have regarding the combing of the social sciences with computer science? Link to article: http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-hack-the-hackers-the-human-side-of-cybercrime-1.19872?cookies=accepted

Explanation / Answer

Computer scientists have historically identified themselves either as mathematicians or physicists but lately the problems being tackeld by them like security, privacy, usability of pervasive computers, e-voting, etc have a major social side to them. The people are the major piece of the design and the way they communicate and organize themselves is really important to understand to have a good design. This is the domain of social sciences.

The intersection of social sciences with traditional computer science is probably farthest advanced in the area of HCI, and permeates the areas of intellectual property protection (e.g., Copyleft and Creative Commons) and the whole blogging/social networking software area and internet privacy and security.

In the security space, the now-obvious economic aspects of the problem, "social engineering" attacks, and what is often mistakenly referred to as "the stupid user problem" make it hard to avoid the need for social scientist to work on the problem. It seems to me that traditional computer science techniques aren't really able to address some of these problems and hence need a strong aspect of social sciences included in the paradigm.

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