2. The Context of Cybersecurity: Cyberspace “It is not the Internet that is unnatural, nor our feast for information, but a refusal to consider what their origins are, how and why they are here, where they sit in the flow of our history, and what kinds of men and women brought them about. We think there is something of an obligation in beginning to learn these things…” - A Mind at Play by Soni and Goodman At its most basic level, practicing cybersecurity means securing cyberspace. Therefore, to understand cybersecurity, one must understand what cyberspace is and how it works. Cyberspace is an artificial world that came into existence when the first computer packet was sent over telephone lines in October 1969, three months after man landed on the moon. Only since around 1990, with the birth of the Internet, has it become a substantial world that impacts our daily lives, so it is a very new world. But what is cyberspace exactly? For our purposes, we can define it as an electronic world composed of computer devices that transmit, receive, and process data (digital information). Computer devices include anything and everything that connects to the internet, such as laptops and smartphones and also things we do not usually think of as computers, like printers, smart home devices, cars, etc. This chapter provides a brief overview of how computers and the Internet work. This is a necessary foundation for understanding cybersecurity. 2.1 How Computers Work “The course through which I arrived at it was the most entangled and perplexed which probably ever occupied the human mind.” - Charles Babbage on his envisioning of the Analytical Engine, the world’s first description of a general purpose computer Computers are probably humanity’s greatest scientific achievement. Their ability to outdo humans in mathematical calculations and to outplay us in games like chess and Go Chapter 2
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