ABSTRACT
As the military moves to a manoeuvre approach and away from relying on a defeat level of force, success depends less on preparing solely for a zero-sum game through more efficient kinetic warfare and more on understanding how to achieve a desired effect. The same is true with cyber deception technology. While current cyber deception technology is increasingly sophisticated it is largely constrained to issuing alerts and gathering intelligence, and yet in the physical world we use deception to make an impact on an adversary’s decision-making. Is it possible to do this on a network? It is unclear how the aspirations for cyber deception can be met in a real-world implementation. While there are many good cyber deception tools there is a lack of guidance on how to combine these tools into a cyber deception campaign that has both a technical and cognitive impact. This update session gives an overview of the current state of cyber deception practice and examines the gap between practice and research. It will look at the resources and processes needed for planning cyber deception campaigns and outline ways that we might combine behavioural science with technology in an attempt to shape an attacker’s decision-making processes.

BIOGRAPHY
Debi holds the DST Group-University of Adelaide Chair in Cybersecurity. Debi’s research interests are in the social and behavioural aspects of cybersecurity – particularly in finding ways of ‘patching with people’ as well as technology. She is currently researching transdisciplinary approaches to modelling complex warfighting, how to fuse behavioural science with cyber deception, and the socio-technical aspects of designing complex military systems. Debi was previously Head of the Centre for Cyber Security at Cranfield University at the Defence Academy of the UK and was a member of the UK MOD’s Defence Science Expert Committee.

BIOGRAPHY
Ben Whitham is a cyber security entrepreneur and engineer. He has co-founded several Australian cyber security companies, including M5 Network Security and Penten. After a career in the military, he spent the next 10 years in cyber incident response teams dealing with detection and alert fatigue. His recent focus has been on building a team at Penten to deliver products that use realistic automations to simplify the use of cyber deception and increase the ROI.