"Turning Hackers' Behavior against Them"
The new Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses (ReSCIND) program aims to use cyberpsychology to discourage and thwart cybercriminals. According to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), cyberpsychology is a scientific field that combines human behavior and decision-making within the cyber domain. It takes advantage of vulnerabilities in human psychology, much like online advertising or gaming. Cyber defense rarely uses it to predict, understand, and influence cyber operator behavior. The ReSCIND program plans to use hackers' psychological patterns to lower the success and effectiveness of cyberattacks. IARPA will research and analyze the cognitive vulnerabilities of hackers, such as their mental or emotional states and decision-making biases, in order to discover how defenders can exploit them to prevent a successful cyberattack. Network operators can set up safeguards that make an attacker's operations more difficult to carry out by gaining insight into the thought process underlying hackers' tactics. The program has three phases, with the first focusing on developing bias sensors that detect malicious actors' cognitive vulnerabilities. In the second phase, participants will create cyberpsychology-informed defenses (CyphiDs) to induce, exploit, or amplify hackers' cognitive vulnerabilities by developing software that links bias sensors with bias triggers. During the final phase, participants will develop computational cognitive models that reflect and predict attackers' behavior, based on findings from the previous phases. This article continues to discuss the goals and phases of the ReSCIND program.