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Cybersecurity is the protection of computer systems from the theft or damage to their hardware, software, or information, as well as from disruption or misdirection of the provided services (Schatz, Bashroush, & Wall, 2017; Hosny, Gouda, & Mohamed, 2020). Along with the increasing use of the Internet and mobile devices in business, government organizations, and civilian’s life, cybersecurity has become a major concern of the society. The estimated average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information is increasing dramatically every year (IBM Security, 2018).
There have been numerous taxonomies of cybersecurity (e.g., Jouini, Rabai, & Aissa, 2014; ENISA, 2016). The following is a list of common types of cybersecurity threats.
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Backdoor: A secret method of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in the system.
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Denial-of-service attack: An offensive attempt to make a computer or network resource unavailable to its intended users.
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Direct access attack: An offensive attempt to gain access to a computer and to directly download data from it.
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Eavesdropping: Unauthorized real-time interception of a private communication on the network.
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Spoofing attack: A fraudulent practice to masquerades the sender of a message as a source known to the receiver.
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Tampering: A malicious modification of hardware and software products.
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Privilege escalation: A fraudulent practice to elevate the access privilege level without authorization.
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Phishing: An attempt to acquire sensitive information directly from users using a fake website.
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Clickjacking: A malicious technique of tricking a web user into clicking on something different from what the user perceives they are clicking on.
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Social engineering: Psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or disclosing confidential information.
Cybersecurity offenders possess special knowledge in order to make cybersecurity threats. To fight against cybersecurity threats, the organization must possess superior knowledge of cybersecurity to take proactive actions. Empirical studies (Bahl & Wali, 2014; Neal & Ilsever, 2016) have suggested that knowledge management (KM) can be an effective tool to tackle cybersecurity issues. KM is supported by a KM system (Maier, 2007). A KM system is a sociotechnical system of knowledge development and knowledge sharing which is influenced by diversified human and cultural factors of the organization as well as the enabling roles of technology (Handzic, 2007; 2011). Organizations need to develop effective KM systems for cybersecurity by analyzing the human, cultural, and technological factors underlying the cost, risk, and prevalence of cybersecurity. However, few holistic structural models in the literature exist addressing this important issue; thus, a research study has been initiated to investigate the major constructs of KM for cybersecurity in the context of sociotechnical systems analysis and their interconnected relationships. The research objective of this study is to develop a general framework of sociotechnical systems analysis for KM for cybersecurity. Specifically, the study applies the sociotechnical systems analysis approach to investigation of the major constructs of effective KM systems for cybersecurity. The rest of the article is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature of sociotechnical systems in the context of KM for cybersecurity. The subsequent five sections present a sociotechnical system analysis of KM for cybersecurity, and describe the five key constructs of sociotechnical systems of KM for cybersecurity, including roles of KM in cybersecurity, organizational structure of KM for cybersecurity, tools of KM for cybersecurity, cybersecurity analytics process, and KM system architecture for cybersecurity. The sociotechnical systems analysis of KM for cybersecurity is followed by two discussion sections. The final section concludes this study.