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The majority of current discussions on cyber-security is related to technical and legal issues. However, cyber is expanding from the technical incident level to the cyber social artefacts level. It is a new terrain enabling a variety of physical and social constructions. It contains human and automated activities, which are connected solidly to the traditional physical world and its functionalities. The nature of the emerging, new phenomena in the comprehensive cyber world and its security are not yet very well understood. So, the increasing of understanding about cyber-security requires studying of the concept of cyber as well as the technology and human structures and activities in the cyber world.
The purpose of this paper is to outline a methodology for figuring out what types of information shall be shared via strategic level communication to support cyber-security. With this methodology the key development issues required to create relevant strategic messages can be sorted out. The paper follows the system modeling approach and considers the cyber world as a complex adaptive system. First, the paper studies shortly the key concepts of the cyber world and strategic communication. Then a social system model of a society is applied as an approach for the identifying of emergent phenomena and characteristics of the cyber-security.
Cyber is typically defined as “of, relating to, or involving computers or computer networks (as the Internet)” (Merriam-Webster, 2013). The common cyber concepts and terms include cyber domain, cyberspace, cyber world and cyber-security. First, the definitions of domain, space and world are compared to find out their differences. Domain is “an area of knowledge or activity”, space is “a limited extent in one, two, or three dimensions” and world is “the earth with its inhabitants and all things upon it” (Merriam-Webster, 2013). So, domain is more limited than space that is more limited than world. This paper has a system modeling view on cyber and therefore uses the most comprehensive concept, i.e., world to approach the emergent phenomena of cyber.
The concept of the cyber world does not have a commonly agreed definition. Therefore, in this paper the definition is derived from the definitions of world and cyber. The cyber world is defined as the earth with its inhabitants and all things upon it related to or involving computers and computer networks. This definition considers cyber as a new comprehensive terrain holding up the constructions of a modern society. It allows the studying of the phenomena and characteristics of cyber without locking the study on any technology.
Merriam-Webster (2013) states that cyberspace was first used in the year 1982 and defines it as “the online world of computer networks and especially the Internet”. ITU (2011) states that they use the terms cyberspace, cyber environment and critical information infrastructure interchangeably. ITU (2011) refers to ITU-T (2008) for the definitions of terms. ITU-T (2008) defines that cyber environment “includes users, networks, devices, all software, processes, information in storage or transit, applications, services, and systems that can be connected directly or indirectly to networks”. This is quite a broad definition and it has a similar view on cyber as this paper. Hathaway and Klimburg (2012) discuss cyber terms and definitions and argue that cyberspace is more than hardware, software and information systems of the internet. They state that it contains people and social interaction in the networks as well (Hathaway & Klimburg, 2012). So, they support the broad view on cyber too. In addition, Hathaway and Klimburg (2012) refer to the definition of cyber in ISO (2012) that supports the broad view on cyber. It allows the addressing of human behavior in the context of cyber.