Every year they’ll chase a different pig through the village, as we say in German. This year in IT security it is cybersecurity. Especially the United States have funded research on this topic and created frameworks as if there is no tomorrow. There are conferences brimming with enticing titles like “Meet the rock stars of cybersecurity!”
But what does it mean? What is cybersecurity?
I personally understood cybersecurity as describing the security realm when and where process IT (e.g. SCADA systems) gets connected to regular IT regardless of the industry. This new trend is one of the major driving factors as part of the Digital Business Transformation and fourth industrial revolution, also known as the Internet of Things. However, this is only my view to define the term.
Some people seem to associate Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and how their organization can be protected from them with cybersecurity. Yet others seem to relate cybersecurity to regulated industries like defense and utilities. Some seem to associate cybersecurity with advanced monitoring and logging solutions that help identify attacks. Others connect forensics and threat intelligence with cybersecurity. And finally for some it seems as if they replace IT with cyber and they are there.
And this is exactly what you will find, when you read introductions to cybersecurity. “Computer security, also known as cybersecurity or IT security,…” is the first line when you search for cybersecurity in Wikipedia. The pervasiveness and ubiquity of software and computers in mobile devices or smart wearables, have driven a cultural and language change, so that the term “cybersecurity” is favored before IT/computer security.
So cybersecurity means to secure all your assets anywhere anytime and this is the definition that I will use going forward.
Gerlinde 