Communities, Agency, and Resilience: A Perspective Addressing Tragedy of the Cyber Commons
Published in Cyber Defense Review (Authors: Samir Jarjoui, Robert Murimi, Renita Murimi), 2024
Cybersecurity suffers from a “tragedy of the commons” problem, where people and institutions have adopted lax security practices due to a tendency to weigh the perceived costs of adopting sound cybersecurity practices as higher than their expected benefits. For example, despite advancements in cybersecurity measures and extensive investments in tools and strategies to counter cyberattacks, foundational best practices have faltered leading to global cybersecurity challenges. Part of the dilemma stems from the fact that cybersecurity continues to be approached with a limited mindset, which creates a significant threshold of social cohesiveness for combating cyber threats. In the meantime, the cyber threat landscape continues to proliferate and exploit the fragile networks that we all inhabit. This paper provides a community-centered framework for cyber resilience that offers a starting point for addressing the tragedy of the commons problem in cybersecurity.