Home / Library / BECO: Behavioral Economics of Cyberspace Operations

BECO: Behavioral Economics of Cyberspace Operations

Journal of Cyber Security and Information Systems Volume: 2 Number: 2 - Games People Play Behavior and Security

Overview

This paper proposes a risk-management framework Behavioral Economics of Cyberspace Operations (BECO) for hardening Cyberspace Operations (CO) with the Behavioral Economics (BE) models of cognitive biases in judgment and decision-making. In applying BE to CO, BECO augments a common assumption of a rational cyber warrior with more realistic expressions of human behavior in cyberspace. While the current development of the cyber workforce emphasizes education and training, BECO addresses typical conditions under which rational decision-making fails and knowledge is neglected. The BECO framework encompasses a full set of cyber actors, including attackers, defenders, and users on the friendly and adversary sides, across the full CO spectrum in space and time, and offers a structured approach to the cognitive bias mitigation.

Why is this important?

Advances in behavioral economics makes it possible to operationalize basic theory regarding human cognitive systems to support tactical and strategic offensives. Cyber technologies are a logical mechanism for weaponizing such knowledge; developing appropriate offensive and defensive capabilities requires an adequate understanding of the rapidly developing challenges in this domain. -- BA

Creator

Victoria Fineberg

Publication Date

August 9, 2014

Downloads