Historical account of Cybersecurity

César Barreto / 02 FEB 2023

We live in the information age, this implies innumerable changes in the life of the human being, in
its different social sectors, its governments and states. The digital age has influenced everything
we have built, which is why we associate Information and Communication Technologies with
innumerable activities that contribute to the perception, structuring and understanding of life.
Therefore, given our evolutionary nature, the right to feel safe in the information age leads us to
develop cybersecurity and cyberdefence, so that we can guarantee the right to privacy, anonymity
and the protection of tangible and intangibles. high value. That is why the human being is
concerned with learning more about cybersecurity studies, legal analysis on computer law and
criminological approaches in virtual spaces, since there is a need to promote information security,
both in the State and in the sectors social, so that it is understood that it is a right to contribute to
the appropriation of knowledge and the necessary tools to guarantee the security of information
in personal and governmental spaces of action, as well as to create virtual spaces for training on
new trends in information security. information and preventive measures.

Where did the word Cybernetics come from?

The term "cybernetics" is a term as old as the Greek "polis" or "Parthenon" itself, indicating that:
"Cybernetics comes from the Greek κυβερνητική and means "art of piloting a ship", although Plato
used it in The Republic with the meaning of "art of directing men" or "art of governing" Over the
centuries, the word went unnoticed until the first decades of the 20th century, when writers such
as Norbert Wiener were precursors of studies that explain the relationships and differentiations
between living beings and structures artificially created by man. Wiener suggested that the aim of
"cybernetics" was the development of "[...] a language and techniques that allow us to actually
attack the problem of control and communication in general, but also to find a good repertoire of
ideas and techniques to classify its particular manifestations in certain concepts". It should be
noted that Wiener had his first incursions theoretical ones from the hand of Arturo Rosenblueth
Stearns, being one of the structuring of the cybernetic foundations highlighting "the problem of
man-machine interaction". It was thus that the foundations of what would be "cybernetics" were
laid, which examined the areas of control and communication both in the human, animal and
machine interrelation.

These beginnings of "cybernetic" thought, which undertook biological and physical explanations,
later had Ross Ashby one of the architects of current reflections. Ashby visualized in his work "An
Introduction to Cybernetics", the vastness and connection of the subject, and pointed out that this
branch of thought would tend to reveal "[...] a large number of interesting and suggestive parallels
between the machine, the brain and society. And it can provide a common language by which
discoveries in one branch can easily be put to use in others."

These three study factors (machine/brain/society) coincide in an interoperability that serves as a

Somehow, that cultural impregnation expressed by the previous authors was imbued with an
«unintelligible» extension, linked to the idiom typical of the eighties, where the extensive use of
the prefix "ciber" tended to identify very diverse activities or approaches. But it is important to
clarify that it is linked to that connectivity and radiality of the information typical of the
computational media that are assumed as cells of a virtual system. As Von Foerster (2003)
proposes: "[...] cybernetics arises when the effectors (say, a motor, a machine, our muscles, etc.)
are connected to a sensory organ that in turn works with its signals on the effectors. It is this
circular organization that establishes cybernetic systems [...]".

When did you start talking about cyberspace?

Those complexities that we previously visualized about those words that precede the prefix
«cyber», are manifested in the use of the word "cyberspace", which contradictorily is not initially
linked to the theories of control or systems that shaped "cybernetics" disciplinary. Several authors
date the term to 1984 with reference to the literary work of William Gibson, who describes
"cyberspace" in one of his fictional passages as: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators, in all nations, by children being taught high mathematical
concepts... A graphical representation of information abstracted from the banks of all the
computers in the human system. Unimaginable complexity." Despite the novelty of this proposal,
what Gibson exposed gives an appetizer of what would certainly be the interconnected digital
scenario a few decades later, which is consistent with what was suggested in his work
"Neuromancer".

Entering a more theoretical field, Cicognani tries to break into the terminological depths to
propose that: "[...] in the term cyber+space, space assumes the meaning of physical matter, while
cyber gives it immaterial characteristics". Unifying the physical and the virtual has not been easy,
and it has required a deep analytical exercise to broaden and collapse old paradigms that made
the material imperative to assume it as real.

This intense debate on "cyberspace" has led to reflections such as those of Post (2013) who
indicates: "[...] the question 'is cyberspace really a place'?" is like asking if life in the land is
"identical to" or "different from" life in the ocean. The answer is that it is, simultaneously, both ".
Even assuming a position of recognition of cyberspace, the different currents of thought fall back
into another bifurcation

analytical, which consists of abstracting "cyberspace" from the social and focusing on
"instrumentalist" explanations, which, although important, end up being incomplete, finding
systematic explanations such as those of Folsom (2007), which details it: "[. ..] as an embedded
switched network for moving data traffic, further characterized by varying degrees of access,
browsing, computing-activity, and increased trust."

On the other hand, the definitions tending to address this virtual space, narrowing it with the
human, stand out, since the conceptualizations, uses, contributions, cannot be separated from its
social essence, and "cyberspace" is ultimately an anthropic creation. As Anders (2001) points out:
"We can characterize cyberspace as the spatial reference used in electronic media, but that raises
our need to define space itself, so we experience how space is actually the product of mental
processes." complex".

Origin of security in information environments

The absolute dimension that Information and Communication Technologies were deploying on the
different sectors that make up society ended up being overwhelming, and security begins to be
affected by this phenomenon due to the number of new dynamics that arise from it. As Caro
notes: "Just like the so-called world web or World Wide Web, (...) it has evolved, so have the
threats it faces." In this sense, strategic analyzes must always run in parallel with the
reconfigurations or emergence of threats in order to delineate their projection towards security
and defense. When Fred Cohen ventured to state an unknown feature of computing such as
viruses, the conceptions rooted in 1984 did not initially notice the strategic impact, specifying the
researcher: "We define computer "virus" as a program that can 'infect' other programs by
modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself." These appreciations of Cohen at the
time seemed to be limited to a technical characterization of civilian computing matters, but
theoretical assimilation was what led to the start of talk of "cyber threats" in different countries
and this gave rise to "cyber defense" and how consequence to “Cybersecurity”.

It would be necessary to add to the exposed technical variable, the global trend, where the
population and its institutions began to interact closely with cybernetic systems, to the point that
Castells described this relationship as: "the extension and growth of the body and mind of subjects
humans in interaction networks powered by software-operated microelectronic communication
technologies". This panorama showed a technological exposure, together with the potential of a
threat that led to the establishment of new nuances in Information Security, constituting more
specific sub-areas such as the so-called "Cybersecurity" or "Computer Forensics".