Jane Edwards
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has awarded five companies research contracts under a potential four-year program that seeks to develop a technology designed to counter cyber attackers by exploiting their cognitive weaknesses through cyberpsychology combined with traditional cybersecurity practices.
The Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses program, or ReSCIND, intends to disrupt threat actors’ attacks by leveraging their cognitive vulnerabilities, innate decision-making biases and other human limitations, IARPA said Thursday.
“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 Kimberly Ferguson-Walter, ReSCIND program manager.
“This novel approach of focusing on the human behind the attack will significantly enhance our layered cyber defenses,” added Ferguson-Walter.
The University of Maryland’s Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Mitre will perform test and evaluation work on the ReSCIND program.
The awardees are:
- Charles River Analytics
- GrammaTech
- Peraton Labs
- RTX’s Raytheon Technologies Research Center
- SRI International
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