Poster: Development of Situation Awareness Measurement for Cybersecurity Professionals

Better understanding of the implications of many aspects of human behavior, especially that of cybersecurity professionals, can help develop the cybersecurity workforce. Despite efforts aimed at documenting and understanding cybersecurity professionals’ knowledge, understanding of how cognition supports human performance in specific cybersecurity tasks remains limited. Specifically, understanding of the elements of situation awareness (SA), defined as goal-directed knowledge, is necessary to support human-centered evaluation, selection, training, and recruitment strategies. In this poster, we propose a framework for developing measures of situation awareness for cybersecurity professionals and a method of capturing initial effectiveness data that does not rely on access to proprietary information. While this will not be a complete solution to the problem of limited access, we aim to shorten the path between observation and measurement by demonstrating a process of creating SA measurement from a ransomware simulation.