On Human-Integrated Cybersecurity - an Exploration in Memes

Journal - 2/19/2024 - Cybersecurity and Social Science

For those of you that aren't my professor, today's assignment was to peruse a selection of images and then meme-ify three of them as a commentary on human-centric cybersecurity. 
Human-centered cybersecurity is an approach to designing, implementing, and managing cybersecurity measures with a primary focus on the needs, behaviors, and experiences of the human users involved. This approach recognizes that humans play a crucial role in the security of systems and data and aims to create solutions that are effective, user-friendly, and aligned with human behavior. Most cybersecurity experts share the idea that humans are the weak link in cybersecurity. Just take this article that states, "Humans are the weakest link in any structure, and that’s no secret." and then goes on to list four reasons why that's true. And it may be true, but what if the reason for this is that when we make cybersecurity tools, we don't make them in a human-centric mindset?


This picture was generated by Artificial Intelligence with the prompt "Human-Integrated Cybersecurity." While I always love a good "AI can't do hands," what I really like about this is the way the humans are part of the technology diagram, as they should be.


You can't talk about the human side of cyber attacks without talking about phishing, and can you really talk
about phishing without that classic Nigerian Prince scam? In this one, a poor sucker has just learned that the Nigerian Prince that promised to send him millions if he could just send the prince a few thousand isn't real.




In this one we see an attacker performing open-source intelligence gathering. This is using publicly available information, most of which people voluntarily publish, to identify an attack vector.
In this case they will craft their attack around the person love of pups and candles.


Lastly, let's talk about geo-tagging in photos. I know that it is super helpful in finding pictures from that one trip to such and such, but if you don't remember to remove those embedded tags before posting to your favorite social media site, you're letting everyone else know where the picture was taken, which can be especially dangerous if the pictures are posted near real-time!