Cyber Planners Should Be Carefully Watching The Coronavirus

In 1983 computer science Ph.D. student Fred Cohen developed a novel software program that would surreptitiously install itself on host computers and quietly surrender all rights, privileges, and data to Cohen. Upon seeing the extraordinary success of the software after it was tested on university computers, Professor Len Adelman commented to Cohen that the behavior of the software reminded him of research he was conducting into HIV infections — and thus was born the term "computer virus."

The history of Cohen and Adelman's neologism is more than an interesting anecdote — it illustrates that computer experts recognized from the start the value of using medical models as a way to understand what is now known as cybersecurity. Examples of that abound: Cybersecurity experts have adopted nearly wholesale the tools used in epidemiology for use when fighting cyberattacks, and genetic researchers have helped cyber professionals use statistical models designed to study