With computer systems becoming
ubiquitous and the IT lexicon becoming omnipresent in most organisations, IT
security is one of the top priorities for most organisations. As firms start
collecting more data about customers, rise of business analytics and Big data
capabilities, companies now have more to keep safe. The rising popularity of
Cloud computing on the other hand leaves organisations with less control on its
assets. The annual economic impact of Cyber crime is estimated to be higher
than that of the Drug trade [1] and by some
estimates it’s twice as much as the economic impact of the 9/11 attack [2] . While organisations
have had focus on IT security for a long time and have spent vast amounts of
money, cyber attacks and news of hacked systems are far from being history.
About 6.5M new Malware were created across the Internet in the first quarter of
2013 alone [3] .
Our traditional approaches have brought limited
success so far. This paper argues that Cyber systems are Complex Adaptive
systems. Principles from Complexity science – inspired by system thinking and
natural science, something that has been extensively used social science,
finance & economics, and epidemiology – should be explored for use in Cyber
security to complement the more traditional methods. This paper introduces some
of the high level approaches, it however does not get into the implementation
details.
Read full article...
Read full article...
