TIM Review October 2014: Cybersecurity

The October issue of the TIM Review is the first of two issues on Cybersecurity.  The second issue will be published in November 2014.  The guest editor for both issues is Prof Tony Bailetti, Director of Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program (TIM) and Executive Director (Acting) of the VENUS Cybersecurity Corporation.

Thirteen authors contributed four articles, a Q&A, and a summary of a TIM Lecture to this issue of the TIM Review. Two of these authors work in industry, five in government, and four in universities. Two of the authors are completing their master program at Carleton University.

Tony Bailetti is at Carleton University; Renaud Levesque is Director General and D’Arcy Walsh is a Science Advisor at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Their article offers a view of a future state of the online world that places safety, productivity and creativity above all else.

Dan Craigen is a Science Advisor, Nadia Diakun-Thibault is Senior Science and Analytics Advisor, and Randy Purse is the Senior Learning Advisor at the Information Technology Security Learning Centre at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). These authors propose a definition of cybersecurity that is concise, inclusive, meaningful, and unifying for the purpose of enabling enhanced and enriched interdisciplinary dialectics.

Mika Westerlund, Assistant Professor at Carleton University’s School of Business, and Risto Rajala, Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, examine survey data from 109 value-added resellers of a multinational supplier. They show that resellers are more committed to stock and sell cybersecurity products and services if the supplier’s digital channel marketing provides tools that help them sell the solutions to end customers.

Walter Miron is a Director of Technology Strategy at TELUS Communications and Kevin Muita is a graduate student in the Technology Innovation Management program at Carleton University. Their article examines relevant cybersecurity capability maturity models to identify the standards and controls available to providers of critical infrastructure in an effort to improve their level of security preparedness.

Chen Han is an independent consultant that leads technical teams to develop information system solutions. She and Rituja Dongre are both graduate students in the Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program at Carleton University. Their Q&A answers the question: What motivates cyber-attackers?

George Cybenko is the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Darmouth College. He delivered the 6th TIM Lecture of 2014. Cybenko provided an overview of possible security metrics together with their pros and cons in the context of current information technology security practices. He also presented a modelling and simulation approach that produces meaningful quantitative security metrics as the basis for a more rigorous science of cybersecurity.

Image license: CC BY by Nick Carter