Social Work in Cyber-Security

The modern cyberspace features complex and highly evolving threats against users and particular vulnerable groups, such as youths and children. Rather than being a purely technical domain, cyber-security is a complex and multi-dimensional field that requires comprehensive evaluations and understanding of human behavior, social dynamics, and prevailing organizational structures, especially considering the increasingly sophisticated nature of cybercrimes in today’s society. To be effective, cyber-security requires critical considerations of current and evolving human factors and processes, including the complex processes of interactions between technology and human belief-thought-behavior patterns, in protection, detection, response, and recovery programs. This study applies a review and synthesis of relevant findings in a sample of 25 credible sources to demonstrate and prove the critical and special value and place of social work, as a field, in cyber-security and its goals. Findings in the review show that social work has special value in effective cyber-security programs, based on its unique capacity to mobilize useful societal and human knowledge and resources to confront and address the complex and evolving nature of cyber-threats from a holistic approach. This value rests on social work’s foundations and fields of practice, particularly the person-in-environment and human behavior in a social environment (HBSE) models, social work policy practice, forensic and clinical social work, and community development. Collaborations between social work and information/computing sciences based on these foundations/fields of social work represent an important pathway toward more productive, sustainable, impactful, and socially just cyber-security programs in the modern society.