Biblio

Inverting human factors can aid in cyber defense by flipping well-known guidelines and using them to degrade and disrupt the performance of a cyber attacker. There has been significant research on how we perform cyber defense tasks and how we should present information to operators, cyber defenders, and analysts to make them more efficient and more effective. We can actually create these situations just as easily as we can mitigate them. Oppositional human factors are a new way to apply well-known research on human attention allocation to disrupt potential cyber attackers and provide much-needed asymmetric benefits to the defender.

Technology’s role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and validate cyber defense systems according to basic principles and design philosophy. Concurrently, the collective science must advance. These goals are not mutually exclusive pursuits: therefore, toward both these ends, this research provides cyber-cognitive links between cyber defense challenges and major human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research areas that offer solutions and instructive paths forward. In each area, there exist cyber research opportunities and realms of core HFE science for exploration. We raise the cyber defense domain up to the HFE community at-large as a sprawling area for scientific discovery and contribution.