PhD Project: Cyber security (analysis and evaluation)
The increasing reliance on cyberspace for personal, professional, commercial, industrial and infrastructure activities pose serious cybersecurity challenges for individuals, business and government. There is the risk of individuals’ privacy being compromised from hacks of their personal accounts, or business and government databases; and the theft of intellectual property can also compromise business and government activities resulting in economic lose (National Science and Technology Council, 2016). This work will concentrate on undertaking research into developing risk assessment methods for quantifying cybersecurity risks for different organisations, both government and private. The research activity has two main aims:
- Evaluation for cybersecurity risk assessment. The aim is to identify what should be evaluated for undertaking cybersecurity risk assessment, what data should be collected for this evaluation, and how should cybersecurity risk be measured and quantified. This will require determining cyberspace vulnerabilities and threats posed by adversaries, and how the likelihood and consequences of cybersecurity events should be measured and quantified. This work will be undertaken using evidence-based methods, hence they will be based on real-life data and examples.
- Quantify costs and savings associated with mitigation strategies. The goal is to develop risk mitigation strategies and to quantify their value. This will require determining the costs associated with successful cybersecurity breaches without risk mitigation strategies or with existing risk mitigation strategies, and the costs associated with introducing new risk mitigation strategies and the reduction in costs associated with successful or unsuccessful cybersecurity breaches with the new risk mitigation strategies. This work will be evidence-based and involve experimental designs to ascertain which new risk mitigation strategies work best and the conditions under which they work best.
Applications can be made by selecting the below link.
Please attach supporting documentation including a covering letter outlining why you would like to undertake the PhD project and a current CV including 2 referees. Please note that more than one application can be made if you wish to be considered for more than one PhD project.