Today, the LA Times had an article about how the White House is urging national standards for Cyber Security. Although this is a great idea (and we already have a wonderful set of standards in the work done by NIST), they used “that word”. Yup. They used a word that is increasingly starting to annoy me, because it doesn’t convey any additional meaning. What word is that? Cyber.
Mirriam-Webster defines the word as “Of the culture of computers, information technology, and virtual reality”. But that’s not the sense they mean. “Cyber” tends to be used as modernjargonspeak for what we know better as “Information Assurance”, and in an earlier age we tended to call “Computer Security”, but perhaps tinged with a sense of offense or resliency. Those terms conveyed meaning, but “cyber”? C’mon.
Reread that LA Times article. Replace every occurrance of “Cyber” with “computer-based”, and it works equally well. So I can’t see why we are so enamored of this new term; it adds no meaning. But use the term, and folks think you are current and happening and aware of the latest trends. I’ll probably start using it as well, because it is expected of me. But the technology and the approach doesn’t same: the science of information assurance / computer security will still serve to protect systems.