Bio

Ghita Mezzour received her Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in May 2015. She was part of both the School of Computer Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at CMU. Ghita is currently an Assistant Professor at the International University of Rabat in Morocco. Her research interests are at the intersection of cyber security, big data, and socio-technical systems. Ghita holds a Master and a Bachelor in Communication Systems from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland

A Socio-Technical Approach to Cyber-Security

A Socio-Technical Approach to Cyber-Security

Cyber security has both technical and social dimensions. Understanding and leveraging the interplay of these dimensions can help design more secure systems and more effective policies. However, the majority of cyber security research has only focused on the technical dimension. In my work, I study cyber-security using a socio-technical approach that combines data science techniques, computational models, and network science techniques.

I will start by presenting my work on empirically identifying factors behind international variation in cyber attack exposure and hosting. I use data from 10 million computers worldwide provided by a key anti-virus vendor. The results of this work indicate that reducing attack exposure and hosting in the most affected countries requires addressing both social and technical issues such as corruption and computer piracy. Then, I will present a computational methodology to assess cyber warfare capabilities of all the countries in the world. The methodology captures political factors that motivate countries to develop these capabilities and technical factors that enable such development. Together, these projects show that bridging the social and technical dimensions of cyber security can improve our understanding of the dynamics of cyber security and have a real-world impact