LIS 640: InfoEcon and Cybersecurity

Welcome to LIS 640: InfoEcon and Cybersecurity. This course is one of our “Topics in Information Science” courses about current topics related to information science. This course is a course on cybersecurity, with a focus on the role that human behavior plays in cybersecurity and ways that we can influence and shape that behavior to improve security. We will be looking at the myriad of ways that people abuse technology and why they do that. Then we will look at ways that we can think about stopping that abuse, and why we aren’t already doing that.

This class is synchronous and in-person, and meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30–10:45am, in the Cataloging Lab (HC White Room 4191F, in the back of the iSchool Library).

The class only has one required book: “You’ll See This Message When Its Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches” by Josephine Wolff. I recommend you buy this book (either eBook or physical is fine) as we will be reading a good bit of it, and it is very interesting reading. You’ll need the book immediately for the first week of the class. There is only one copy available throught the Wisconsin Library, so I recommend buying the eBook. (This page has links to buy it from multiple retailers.).

Also, UW-Madison provides free subscriptions to a number of major newspapers including The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I highly recommend that you sign up for your free subscriptions. Throughout the semester, we will be reading news stories about cybersecurity events from these newspapers and analyzing them in class.