SUSTAINABLE CYBERSECURITY: APPLYING LESSONS FROM THE GREEN MOVEMENT TO MANAGING CYBER ATTACKS

This article compares the current threat from cyberspace to the past and current threat corporations and nation states have faced that originated from climate change. Specifically, the crux of the argument is the issue of the “Commons” and collective action problem in the commons. Failure to regulate enviormnetal degradation comes from unclear ownership rights and the difficulty in cross-domain coordination. Similarly, the authors of the article point out that failure to coordination a mutually-beneficial global cyber policy origonates heavily from the issues of ownership attribution and cross-domain coordination. For example, the Sony attack by North Korean state hackers revealed that current measures of threat detection and response are not only insufficient, but counterintuitive to the larger interests a secured corporate network holds to domestic and international stabiltiy.

This Article is structured in three parts: Part 1 is the introduction, and Part 2 establishes the comparative framework by summarizing recent environmental and cyber threats facing the private sector and introduces the issue of the commons. Subsequently, Part3 introduces the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and further clarifies the link between cybersecurity and sustainability–– that not only is the corporate social responsibiltiy and human rights framework integral to both environmental regulation and cyber regulation (because of the problem of the Commons), but also that cyber sustainability is integral to environmental sustainability.

Overall, I found this article to be a great supplementary material to our class discussions on the relationship between sustainability and cybersecurity. Moreover, it focuses specifically on approaching it as a political economy issue and how corporate governance models should be adjusted, which are of personal interests to me.