Cyber Vulnerability: An Attentional Dilemma

Cyber security remains an ominous task for the military. Generating awareness of some cyber challenges is daunting, yet aspects of cyber vulnerabilities are often ambiguous to everyday operators. Many of these challenges have been documented in prior papers. The current effort focused on two studies which describe levels of general awareness of cyber challenges among students (a typical age range for entry-level military operators). The studies asked participants to evaluate aerial images and to determine if the images had been degraded. Following a positive degradation identification, participants were asked to list the reason for the perceived degradation by drawing from a set of four options. The option related to cyber attack was proportionally used much less than the others, even in the context of an explicit experimental prime to motivate cyber awareness and vulnerabilities. The implications for these results for interactions with autonomous systems are discussed.