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Public Health & Cyber Public Health

Technical Report 22-01 | 2022

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This project was undertaken to provide a structured approach to the question “How can we systematically translate the lessons of public health to cybersecurity?” This paper uses a populartextbook, Mary-Jane Schneider’s Introduction to Public Health (6th ed) as a structure to answer the question, following Dr. Schneider’s understanding of that field. Comparisons between cybersecurity and health are legion — we speak of computer viruses, despite their lack of RNA. And of course, analogies all have limits.

KEY LESSONS

There are a number of key lessons from the project. The first is that public health exists in tension with other values. While none of us want contaminated drinking water, sometimes providing safe water is expensive. None of us want contaminated food, but the steps to prevent contamination can be expensive, and making food more expensive has other health impacts. Some possible steps, like irradiation, can lead to people being concerned and avoiding safer, healthier irradiated vegetables. The second is that public health, like cybersecurity, is a broad field that can touch on, or be a lens through which to view many different parts of life. That means that it can be hard to “nail down” what public health “really is.”

TAKEAWAYS

  • Public health framing has had a dramatically positive effect on the human experience. The average American lives decades longer than they did at the start of the 20th century.

  • Need for proof points. Public health has many proof points, from the Broad Street pump through the years of life expectancy gained in the 20th century. If we are going to develop a parallel discipline, we will need proof points.

  • Value and breadth of data. There are a great many data sources used by public health, gathered with more rigor, more mandates, and more uses than we have in cybersecurity.

  • Limits of what is possible. There are areas, including weight loss, tobacco, and automotive safety, where massive improvements in years of healthy life are clearly achievable, at a cost that individuals or society is not willing to pay.

  • Complexities of regulation are a result of there being a myriad of financial interests in selling products that either heal or harm people, or in keeping costs down. There are also important issues of framing and “what is the proper role of government”, along with the perception that something is either an individual choice, or that those choices are shaped by societal messages and hard to resist.

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Public Health & Cyber Public Health

Technical Report 22-01 | 2022

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This project was undertaken to provide a structured approach to the question “How can we systematically translate the lessons of public health to cybersecurity?” This paper uses a popular textbook, Mary-Jane Schneider’s Introduction to Public Health (6th ed) as a structure to answer the question, following Dr. Schneider’s understanding of that field. Comparisons between cybersecurity and health are legion — we speak of computer viruses, despite their lack of RNA. And of course, analogies all have limits.

KEY LESSONS

This project was undertaken to provide a structured approach to the question “How can we systematically translate the lessons of public health to cybersecurity?” This paper uses a popular textbook, Mary-Jane Schneider’s Introduction to Public Health (6th ed) as a structure to answer the question, following Dr. Schneider’s understanding of that field. Comparisons between cybersecurity and health are legion — we speak of computer viruses, despite their lack of RNA. And of course, analogies all have limits.

TAKEAWAYS

  • Public health framing has had a dramatically positive effect on the human experience. The average American lives decades longer than they did at the start of the 20th century.
  • Need for proof points. Public health has many proof points, from the Broad Street pump through the years of life expectancy gained in the 20th century. If we are going to develop a parallel discipline, we will need proof points.
  • Value and breadth of data. There are a great many data sources used by public health, gathered with more rigor, more mandates, and more uses than we have in cybersecurity.
  • Limits of what is possible. There are areas, including weight loss, tobacco, and automotive safety, where massive improvements in years of healthy life are clearly achievable, at a cost that individuals or society is not willing to pay.
  • Complexities of regulation are a result of there being a myriad of financial interests in selling products that either heal or harm people, or in keeping costs down. There are also important issues of framing and “what is the proper role of government”, along with the perception that something is either an individual choice, or that those choices are shaped by societal messages and hard to resist.

Back

Download

Public Health & Cyber Public Health

Technical Report 22-01 | 2022

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This project was undertaken to provide a structured approach to the question “How can we systematically translate the lessons of public health to cybersecurity?” This paper uses a popular textbook, Mary-Jane Schneider’s Introduction to Public Health (6th ed) as a structure to answer the question, following Dr. Schneider’s understanding of that field. Comparisons between cybersecurity and health are legion — we speak of computer viruses, despite their lack of RNA. And of course, analogies all have limits.

KEY LESSONS

There are a number of key lessons from the project. The first is that public health exists in tension with other values. While none of us want contaminated drinking water, sometimes providing safe water is expensive. None of us want contaminated food, but the steps to prevent contamination can be expensive, and making food more expensive has other health impacts. Some possible steps, like irradiation, can lead to people being concerned and avoiding safer, healthier irradiated vegetables.

The second is that public health, like cybersecurity, is a broad field that can touch on, or be a lens through which to view many different parts of life. That means that it can be hard to “nail down” what public health “really is.”

TAKEAWAYS

  • Public health framing has had a dramatically positive effect on the human experience. The average American lives decades longer than they did at the start of the 20th century.

  • Need for proof points. Public health has many proof points, from the Broad Street pump through the years of life expectancy gained in the 20th century. If we are going to develop a parallel discipline, we will need proof points.

  • Value and breadth of data. There are a great many data sources used by public health, gathered with more rigor, more mandates, and more uses than we have in cybersecurity.

  • Limits of what is possible. There are areas, including weight loss, tobacco, and automotive safety, where massive improvements in years of healthy life are clearly achievable, at a cost that individuals or society is not willing to pay.

  • Complexities of regulation are a result of there being a myriad of financial interests in selling products that either heal or harm people, or in keeping costs down. There are also important issues of framing and “what is the proper role of government”, along with the perception that something is either an individual choice, or that those choices are shaped by societal messages and hard to resist.

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TERMS OF USE

The CyberGreen Institute (“CyberGreen”) Is a non-profit, charitable organization dedicated to the creation and dissemination of metrics measuring the Cyber health of networks along with related data, metrics, and analysis. We also assist network operators with the adoption of Cyber hygiene best practices and risk remediation. A big part of our mission is the collection, calculation, and public distribution of our CyberGreen Index. The CyberGreen Index and the other data that we publish on this website is released under the Affero General Public License (version 3) (the “License”). The use of License ensures that our data remains freely accessible and freely useable by members of the public. (In rare circumstances, we may use another license to distribute data, in which case the specific data set will not be available without a click-thru notice specifying the specific license that applies.)

We do ask that you cite us properly in any academic work as the source for anything that you take from this website. If you are a commercial firm and wish to incorporate our data into a commercial product, you must acknowledge CyberGreen as the source of the data that you used and provide your customers with a link to this website with simple instructions on how to find the data that you took from our site.

We do not publish personally identifiable information (PII) or other information that implicates third party privacy rights. CyberGreen is committed to being compliant with GDPR. Our compliance efforts have been certified by the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (ISIPP).

TERMS OF USE

The CyberGreen Institute (“CyberGreen”) Is a non-profit, charitable organization dedicated to the creation and dissemination of metrics measuring the Cyber health of networks along with related data, metrics, and analysis. We also assist network operators with the adoption of Cyber hygiene best practices and risk remediation. A big part of our mission is the collection, calculation, and public distribution of our CyberGreen Index. The CyberGreen Index and the other data that we publish on this website is released under the Affero General Public License (version 3) (the “License”). The use of License ensures that our data remains freely accessible and freely useable by members of the public. (In rare circumstances, we may use another license to distribute data, in which case the specific data set will not be available without a click-thru notice specifying the specific license that applies.)

We do ask that you cite us properly in any academic work as the source for anything that you take from this website. If you are a commercial firm and wish to incorporate our data into a commercial product, you must acknowledge CyberGreen as the source of the data that you used and provide your customers with a link to this website with simple instructions on how to find the data that you took from our site.

We do not publish personally identifiable information (PII) or other information that implicates third party privacy rights. CyberGreen is committed to being compliant with GDPR. Our compliance efforts have been certified by the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (ISIPP).

TERMS OF USE

The CyberGreen Institute (“CyberGreen”) Is a non-profit, charitable organization dedicated to the creation and dissemination of metrics measuring the Cyber health of networks along with related data, metrics, and analysis. We also assist network operators with the adoption of Cyber hygiene best practices and risk remediation. A big part of our mission is the collection, calculation, and public distribution of our CyberGreen Index. The CyberGreen Index and the other data that we publish on this website is released under the Affero General Public License (version 3) (the “License”). The use of License ensures that our data remains freely accessible and freely useable by members of the public. (In rare circumstances, we may use another license to distribute data, in which case the specific data set will not be available without a click-thru notice specifying the specific license that applies.)

We do ask that you cite us properly in any academic work as the source for anything that you take from this website. If you are a commercial firm and wish to incorporate our data into a commercial product, you must acknowledge CyberGreen as the source of the data that you used and provide your customers with a link to this website with simple instructions on how to find the data that you took from our site.

We do not publish personally identifiable information (PII) or other information that implicates third party privacy rights. CyberGreen is committed to being compliant with GDPR. Our compliance efforts have been certified by the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (ISIPP).

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