Cyber resilience of e-government: comparative case analysis of Estonia and South Korea

Abstract

E-government has evolved throughout modern times and shaped the new norm of governance. While global society pays more attention to this next-generation platform than before, it is also true that state actors should build up a robust security strategy to protect e-government and their extended territory in cyberspace. At the same time, a high level of digitalization does not always mean their e-government framework is also strong enough to endure external threats. This thesis examines the difference in security preparedness of e-government by comparing a set of countries that have similarly well-developed online government but are lagging in the cyber defense aspect. In order to examine this, the research used cyber resilience as a conceptual framework to analyze several factors that cause differences. This concept overcomes the blind spot of the traditional cyber security approach and points out the relation with conventional hard security study. To uncover the differences in cyber security of e-government, this study picks up Estonia as a successful model and South Korea as the opposite. Based on cyber resilience, the thesis identifies external and internal factors including regional security, nature of neighbors, and internal factors triggering variance within these countries.