Location
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
3-1-2024 12:00 AM
End Date
6-1-2024 12:00 AM
Description
The role of cyberspace continues to expand, touching nearly every aspect in our lives. Critical information, when stolen, can be devastating to a nation’s people, economy, and security. To defend against this threat, it is essential to understand the human behind the attack. A first step in developing new defenses where human attackers are involved is obtaining valid and reliable human performance and decision-making data. These data can be procured through rigorous human science research that experimentally evaluates foundational theory and measures human performance. Taking the key concepts from behavioral economics, the game-based testbed, CYPHER, was specifically designed to test the occurrence of the Sunk Cost Fallacy across multiple decisions in an abstract cyber environment. Evaluating decisions made over a series of actions to catch a fictitious cyber thief, we analyze the effects of two antecedents (uncertainty and project completion) and resource expenditure. Our results show that irrespective of condition, significantly more participants unnecessarily wasted resources, demonstrating behavior consistent with the Sunk Cost Fallacy. These data provide a baseline upon which to build artificial intelligence algorithms for automated cyber defense.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Chelsea; Van Tassel, Richard W.; Shade, Temmie; Rogers, Andrew; and Ferguson-Walter, Kimberly, "Adversarial Cognitive Engineering (ACE) and Defensive Cybersecurity: Leveraging Attacker Decision-Making Heuristics in a Cybersecurity Task" (2024). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024 (HICSS-57). 6.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/da/cyber_deception/6
Adversarial Cognitive Engineering (ACE) and Defensive Cybersecurity: Leveraging Attacker Decision-Making Heuristics in a Cybersecurity Task
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
The role of cyberspace continues to expand, touching nearly every aspect in our lives. Critical information, when stolen, can be devastating to a nation’s people, economy, and security. To defend against this threat, it is essential to understand the human behind the attack. A first step in developing new defenses where human attackers are involved is obtaining valid and reliable human performance and decision-making data. These data can be procured through rigorous human science research that experimentally evaluates foundational theory and measures human performance. Taking the key concepts from behavioral economics, the game-based testbed, CYPHER, was specifically designed to test the occurrence of the Sunk Cost Fallacy across multiple decisions in an abstract cyber environment. Evaluating decisions made over a series of actions to catch a fictitious cyber thief, we analyze the effects of two antecedents (uncertainty and project completion) and resource expenditure. Our results show that irrespective of condition, significantly more participants unnecessarily wasted resources, demonstrating behavior consistent with the Sunk Cost Fallacy. These data provide a baseline upon which to build artificial intelligence algorithms for automated cyber defense.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/da/cyber_deception/6