Stop calling it 'Cyber'
Stop using the word “cyber” to refer to anything to do with the Internet. It is as outmoded as calling China “the mysterious Orient”, a term used almost exclusively by groups of people who do not understand what it is. I’ll explain.
The prefix “cyber-“ typically refers to Internet-based things in terms of other, existing things that are more commonly understood: “cyberdefense”, “cybersecurity”, “cyberwarfare”. To understand the full context of “cyber-“, you need to look at the word’s social etymology.
“Cyber” derives from “cyberspace”, a science-fiction term dating back to 1981 when a society intimately connected with global electronic communications was a futuristic concept. The word appears in the works of William Gibson (most famously his novel Neuromancer), where it refers to global network-available data as a kind of virtual world.
The idea that data can exist purely digitally is entirely normal to us in the year 2015, but it was particularly alien to the people of 1981 for whom the written word was something that appeared on paper, and even music or computer data had physical form on cassette tapes or disks.
When the World Wide Web started to take off in the 1990s, people were initially excited for the possibilities it held but generally didn’t know what exactly it was or did. The media used Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as a nickname for this new system. It was a vaguely defined word that conveyed an idea of what the Internet was, without really explaining how it worked or what people did with it.
By the late 90s and early 2000s, people widely understood the Internet and used it every day: free webmail, Google, Napster, AOL Instant Messenger, vBulletin forums and Counter-Strike. These things solidly defined the Internet to people, and it was no longer this mysterious virtual space.
The term “cyberspace” dropped out of Internet users’ vocabularies almost entirely, and the prefix “cyber-“ went unused except in the phrase “cyber-sex”, which became shortened to “cyber”. Five years before the first generation iPhone, “cyber” had already shifted meaning from “virtual world” to “virtual sex”.
Internet users at large were aware of this shift, and of the rapid pace at which neologisms are created, shift and drop out of use in Internet culture. But evidently nobody told the US military, who as of 2015 have spent the last few years increasing the use of prefix “cyber-“ in order to state 21st century Internet problems in terms of things they’re more familiar with.
Hence what we call “IT security”, the MoD calls “cyberdefense”, what we call “hacking” becomes “cyberattack”, and “digital espionage and sabotage” become “cyberwarfare”.
These peculiar terms have even spread to the IT security industry in general, who know that they have to use the military’s jargon if they want to sell to that sector.
But there’s another reason for the use of “cyber”. The word in modern use connotes “cybernetics” or “cyborg”, where via movies like Terminator it has come to connote an advanced, high-tech threat.
While IT security is so dull as an idea that companies routinely fail to secure their own critical systems, concepts like “cyberwarfare” re-frame the issue as vital to national security. Which it is, naturally, but “cyberdefense” sounds more exciting and is more likely to evoke a response when it’s time to convince the public or the politicians of a system’s value.
The concept of “cyberwarfare” also blurs the lines between IT security and offensive hacking, and places the authority for all these in the military’s domain. This is another reason why it’s expedient for the military to use the term.
But “cyber” as a concept is so incredibly vague, and so extremely outmoded as a concept, that anyone who uses the term reveals themselves to have a poor understanding of what exactly the field entails, or assumes their listeners to have such a poor understanding, or both.
The people involved directly in the field of security do not call what they do “cyber”. They are hackers, security engineers, programmers, network engineers, cryptographers or penetration testers. They sell software or security audits.
They do not work “in cyber”. Nobody calls it that except generals who want to conceptualize new problems in terms of familiar warfare, and salesmen who speak in military’s terms to sell software to people who don’t understand what it does.
Update (August 2025): The term “cyber” has, sadly, grown in popularity. The saving grace is that everyone has currently latched onto “AI” as the new magic, so with luck they’ll forget about “cyber”.