Short Essay Assignment

Topic: Your first individual paper will be a case study on operational collaboration in cybersecurity. This is meant to cover a wide range of topics, across protection, detection, and response to include when a single entity cannot take unilateral action and needs to band with others for common purpose. It includes public-private partnerships but also cross-border cooperation between states or between companies, non-profit groups, and the like.

 

You are invited to choose a topic which might align with the group paper. We have relaxed the requirement, mentioned in the syllabus, that the topic needs to be outside of your school (so for example, policy students don’t have to write from a legal or tech perspective).

 

In class we gave a list of topics you might consider including these below. If you have other ideas, feel free to ask the professors for guidance.

1. Collective responses to DDoS attacks and botnets, such as Mirai, Ababil, GoZ, Phosphorous, or attacks against Spamhaus or Brian Krebs
2. Conficker Working Group
3. Process in developing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
4. Development of the PCI/DSS standard
5. Information sharing and cooperative defense groups, such as FSARC, Cyber Threat Alliance, ICASI, or NSP-SEC (we hadn’t mentioned this category in class)

 

Length: Limit of 600 words, not counting footnotes and endnotes. You don’t need to include a Works Cited or Reference section, but the notes must include at least author, title, source (if from a larger work), and link.

 

Format: Your paper must have all of the following sections (and only the following sections):

1. Summary and Recommendation: One paragraph. What happened and was it a successful collaboration?
2. Background: What was the tech, policy, or law problem that needed solving?
3. Discussion: What was the collaboration?
4. Results: Did it work?
5. Recommendations: Should we try it again? What might we change for better results?

 

Submission: The official copy of your homework will be the one uploaded to Courseworks (for SIPA and SEAS students), which must be done by 4:15pm on the day it is due. In addition, please do bring a paper copy to class. Law students, please email a copy to Professor Wolff.