IARPA wants to use psychology to thwart cyber hackers

A new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency project is looking to use psychology to thwart would-be hackers. Many cyber attacks these days use basic human psychology to get people to click on a link, for example, as part of a “phishing” exploit. But IARPA thinks it can flip that paradigm on its head and embed the “cognitive biases” of hackers into network defenses. For an overview of the effort, I spoke with Dr. Kimberly Ferguson-Walter, the program manager for IARPA’s Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses (ReSCIND) program.