SL Research Seminar by Dr Tim Stevens (King's College London) - (host Professor Jinghan Zeng)

Event Details

SL Research Seminar by Dr Tim Stevens (King's College London) - (host Professor Jinghan Zeng)

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Dr Tim Stevens - King's College London



The Map is Not the Territory: The Epistemic Uncertainty of Cyber Risk Assessment



Dr Tim Stevens is Reader in International Security at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and director of the KCL Cyber Security Research Group. He is Senior Academic Fellow at the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security and a Senior Fellow at Cnam, Paris. Dr Stevens has published widely on the politics and strategy of cyber security and cyber conflict, and his latest book is What is Cybersecurity For? (Bristol University Press, 2023).

Abstract:Cyber risk management is a central function of modern organisations and their capacity to prepare for and mitigate the impacts of cyber threats to their digital networks and systems. The assessment of cyber risks is key to enabling decision-making and resource allocation in all organisational contexts and economic sectors. Cyber risk assessment is driven by quantitative methodologies that impose calculative rationality on an operational environment of significant complexity. The results of a survey of cyber risk practitioners, however, indicates that these approaches are fraught with epistemic uncertainty, which undermines claims to the objectivity and effectiveness of cyber risk assessment. This paper presents some initial findings from this research and explores the implications for cyber risk management and cyber security.