Visible to the public Visual structures for seeing cyber policy strategies

TitleVisual structures for seeing cyber policy strategies
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsStoll, J., Bengez, R. Z.
Conference Name2015 7th International Conference on Cyber Conflict: Architectures in Cyberspace
KeywordsComplexity theory, computer security, Cyber Attacks, cyber incident detection, cyber policy strategies, cyber security, cyber security policy, data visualisation, Data visualization, human-computer interaction, information synthesis, information visibility, Organizations, pubcrawl170109, security of data, situation awareness, Terrorism, terrorist attack, Verizon 2014 Data Breach Report, visual structures, visualization
Abstract

In the pursuit of cyber security for organizations, there are tens of thousands of tools, guidelines, best practices, forensics, platforms, toolkits, diagnostics, and analytics available. However according to the Verizon 2014 Data Breach Report: "after analysing 10 years of data... organizations cannot keep up with cyber crime-and the bad guys are winning." Although billions are expended worldwide on cyber security, organizations struggle with complexity, e.g., the NISTIR 7628 guidelines for cyber-physical systems are over 600 pages of text. And there is a lack of information visibility. Organizations must bridge the gap between technical cyber operations and the business/social priorities since both sides are essential for ensuring cyber security. Identifying visual structures for information synthesis could help reduce the complexity while increasing information visibility within organizations. This paper lays the foundation for investigating such visual structures by first identifying where current visual structures are succeeding or failing. To do this, we examined publicly available analyses related to three types of security issues: 1) epidemic, 2) cyber attacks on an industrial network, and 3) threat of terrorist attack. We found that existing visual structures are largely inadequate for reducing complexity and improving information visibility. However, based on our analysis, we identified a range of different visual structures, and their possible trade-offs/limitation is framing strategies for cyber policy. These structures form the basis of evolving visualization to support information synthesis for policy actions, which has rarely been done but is promising based on the efficacy of existing visualizations for cyber incident detection, attacks, and situation awareness.

DOI10.1109/CYCON.2015.7158474
Citation Keystoll_visual_2015