IARPA Wants to Study Cybercriminal Psyche to Better Fight Bad Actors

The research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has launched an innovative program that aims to study the psychology of cyber attackers.

IARPA has granted four-year contracts to five companies to help kickstart the project. The contracts were awarded to Charles River Analytics, Inc., GrammaTech, Inc., Peraton Labs Raytheon Technologies Research Center, and SRI International.

Reimagining cybersecurity with cyberpsychology

The initiative, known as Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses (ReSCIND), aims to utilize the inherent cognitive limitations and decision-making biases of attackers to thwart their malicious activities.

Attackers generally exploit human fallibility and conventional cyber defenses typically neglect to target attackers' cognitive vulnerabilities, but with ReSCIND, IARPA wants to reverse this trend. 

By integrating traditional cybersecurity methodologies with insights from the burgeoning field of cyberpsychology, IARPA is poised to develop cyber technology that significantly raises the bar for attackers, the Office of the Director of  National Intelligence said. 

“ReSCIND will enable the Intelligence Community’s cyber defenders to penalize attackers with the costs of wasted time and effort, which will delay, and potentially thwart, attacks and more rapidly expose the identities behind them,” said ReSCIND Program Manager, Dr. Kimberly Ferguson-Walter. “This novel approach of focusing on the human behind the attack will significantly enhance our layered cyber defenses.”