Institutions for Cyber Security: International Responses and Global Imperatives

The article initially establishes a baseline for representing and managing responses by institutions to the rise of the cyber domain. It enumerates current practices of the industry in regards to cybersecurity, and then establishes that current solutions are still insufficient. The paper analyzes existing institutional theories on the roles and relevance of the cyber domain and compares their current developmental processes in regard to institutional linkages. It then analyzes the prevalence of cyber crime and discusses common organizational responses to these attacks. Finally the paper recommends both additional policies and additional mechanisms for future mitigation of risk from cyberattacks and bad actors in the overall cyber domain. Almost everyone recognizes the salience of cyberspace as a fact of daily life. Given its ubiquity, scale, and scope, cyberspace has become a fundamental feature of the world we live in and has created a new reality for almost everyone in the developed world and increasingly for people in the developing world. This paper seeks to provide an initial baseline, for representing and tracking institutional responses to a rapidly changing international landscape, real as well as virtual. We shall argue that the current institutional landscape managing security issues in the cyber domain has developed in major ways, but that it is still “under construction.” We also expect institutions for cyber security to support and reinforce the contributions of information technology to the development process. We begin with (a) highlights of international institutional theory and an empirical “census” of the institutions-in-place for cyber security, and then turn to (b) key imperatives of information technology-development linkages and the various cyber processes that enhance developmental processes, (c) major institutional responses to cyber threats and cyber crime as well as select international and national policy postures so critical for industrial countries and increasingly for developing states as well, and (d) the salience of new mechanisms designed specifically in response to cyber threats.