Measuring Societal Impacts of Cybersecurity

Abstract

Cybersecurity is more important than ever. All facets of society, including critical sectors such as financial, healthcare, energy, and transportation, are very reliant on cyberspace. Information and communications technology have become more and more relevant in organizations and are crucial elements in organizational learning and networked development and resilience.

This study focuses on the analysis and findings of a cybersecurity questionnaire on the quantitative side of the survey contemplate mainly cybersecurity competences of the personnel in the participants’ companies. The data was analysed with principal component, correspondence analysis, and the Euclidean distance two-dimensional figures.

The extraction method was Principal component analysis to extract 11 factors, with more than 25 iterations. Correspondence analysis shows that the private and public non-authority sectors prefer workers with communication and collaboration skills and an ability for situational awareness. Private subsidiaries prefer leadership skills.

The results show that the Societal Impact Assessment Toolkit questionnaire can be used in organizations or projects to assess the societal impact of their cybersecurity products and services. The questionnaire will be developed to-ward a standardized method, which will require collecting answers from larger numbers of respondents for further evaluation and testing it with ap-propriate qualitative methods. This will add to the body of knowledge on the societal impacts of cybersecurity. The tool is a very practical contribution for companies, while the continued use and the ensuing analysed data that be-comes collected from large numbers of respondents becomes a contribution to theory.