Building cyber resilience through a discursive approach to “big cyber” threat landscapes

Abstract

Cyber safety, security and resilience of Critical Infrastructures (CI) and critical societal functions is a contemporary challenge. To understand the bigger picture, we may build composite threat landscapes in which vulnerabilities and threats combine and travel across distinct domains between which expertise, competence, experience and knowledge horizon related to safety, security and risk may differ substantially. Additional sensitization towards emerging cyber threats is however needed. Inspired by the post-normal “science of what-if”, the “BigCyber” model advance threat landscapes further into sensitivity to hidden, dynamic and emergent vulnerabilities. The approach is exemplified in terms of smart metering of household electricity consumption. The need for discursive support for different stakeholders relating to threat landscapes is identified, and a discursive framework for stepwise nurturing of polycentric governance is outlined. The framework can also be used to elaborate and support the idea of resilience landscapes of autonomous entities, facilitating a polycentric approach to cyber resilience

Building cyber resilience through a discursive approach to “big cyber” threat landscapes