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Transparency, trust and intention: what dismantling the heart of cyberattack public attribution reveals about warring minds
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Transparency, trust and intention: what dismantling the heart of cyberattack public attribution reveals about warring minds

Monica Lopez (LPNP)
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While attribution of a cyberattack is the ultimate goal of threat intelligence, the public announcement of such is presumably the apex of cyber attack prevention and citizen engagement. Confirming a narrative of responsibility for an action or set of actions that have led to conflict and/or harm is a conscientious endeavour: the bad actors have been discovered and they can be punished and the crime with which they are charged has been stopped... until it is not.

In the world of malicious cyber events where attackers can achieve a high degree of digital anonymity and their origins and intentions are not simply reducible to lines of code, the process of attribution is a multi-layered web of hypotheses, technical and non-technical evidence, and interpretations upon interpretations. And when interpretations of culpability enter into open discourse with or without clear and overt evidence and complete with geopolitical consequences equally good, bad or unknown, public announcement is a hotbed of debate. A critical view of the problem from the perspective of the cognitive sciences, moreover, uncovers an unmentioned, yet glaring reality. The problem of attribution and its public announcement is so rightly problematic because it essentially asks and takes action upon the answering of a fundamental question of the 'black box' problem of the human mind/brain: how, why, and does actus reus or a pattern of actions result from and/or lead to mens rea or particular mental states.

In this paper I take a novel cognitive behavioural approach and make a parallel analysis between the 'black box' problem of the human mind/brain with the 'black box' problem of cyber attribution to explain why (i) transparency for setting attribution standards, (ii) trust for de-escalating tensions between nation states, and (iii) geopolitical intentions for dissipating into worthwhile agreement are not enough without clear mental models of the warring minds in conflict.
Monica Lopez
LPNP Dr Monica Lopez is a multilingual business executive, cognitive scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and public speaker. She is the CEO and CSO at La Petite Noiseuse Productions, a consulting firm that integrates human cognition and behavioural insights into machine intelligence development and competitive business solutions. Dr Lopez’s work in human intelligence has led to understanding human-human interactions in multi-sensory, multi-agent environments, resulting in theoretical and applicational insights for autonomous systems, digital healthcare, and data analytics for various industries. She is also teaching faculty at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in several schools throughout the university.

Dr Lopez has been a keynote speaker for IS&T’s Human Vision & Electronic Imaging and Autonomous Vehicles & Machines international conferences in San Francisco, CA, and a plenary speaker and awards judge for AutoSens in Detroit, MI and Brussels, Belgium and other venues. She was recognized in 2016 as a 'particularly imaginative polymath' by the Imagination Institute, University of Pennsylvania and has been a fellow and guest speaker on the ethical and sustainable use of artificial intelligence at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria. Dr Lopez holds B.A.s in psychology and French and an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive science, all from JHU. She is completing a graduate certificate in international studies at the School of Advanced International Studies from JHU.
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Transparency, trust and intention: what dismantling the heart of cyberattack public attribution reveals about warring minds

Monica Lopez (LPNP)
While attribution of a cyberattack is the ultimate goal of threat intelligence, the public announcement of such is presumably the apex of cyber attack prevention and citizen engagement. Confirming a narrative of responsibility for an action or set of actions that have led to conflict and/or harm is a conscientious endeavour: the bad actors have been discovered and they can be punished and the crime with which they are charged has been stopped... until it is not.

In the world of malicious cyber events where attackers can achieve a high degree of digital anonymity and their origins and intentions are not simply reducible to lines of code, the process of attribution is a multi-layered web of hypotheses, technical and non-technical evidence, and interpretations upon interpretations. And when interpretations of culpability enter into open discourse with or without clear and overt evidence and complete with geopolitical consequences equally good, bad or unknown, public announcement is a hotbed of debate. A critical view of the problem from the perspective of the cognitive sciences, moreover, uncovers an unmentioned, yet glaring reality. The problem of attribution and its public announcement is so rightly problematic because it essentially asks and takes action upon the answering of a fundamental question of the 'black box' problem of the human mind/brain: how, why, and does actus reus or a pattern of actions result from and/or lead to mens rea or particular mental states.

In this paper I take a novel cognitive behavioural approach and make a parallel analysis between the 'black box' problem of the human mind/brain with the 'black box' problem of cyber attribution to explain why (i) transparency for setting attribution standards, (ii) trust for de-escalating tensions between nation states, and (iii) geopolitical intentions for dissipating into worthwhile agreement are not enough without clear mental models of the warring minds in conflict.
Monica Lopez
LPNP Dr Monica Lopez is a multilingual business executive, cognitive scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and public speaker. She is the CEO and CSO at La Petite Noiseuse Productions, a consulting firm that integrates human cognition and behavioural insights into machine intelligence development and competitive business solutions. Dr Lopez’s work in human intelligence has led to understanding human-human interactions in multi-sensory, multi-agent environments, resulting in theoretical and applicational insights for autonomous systems, digital healthcare, and data analytics for various industries. She is also teaching faculty at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in several schools throughout the university.

Dr Lopez has been a keynote speaker for IS&T’s Human Vision & Electronic Imaging and Autonomous Vehicles & Machines international conferences in San Francisco, CA, and a plenary speaker and awards judge for AutoSens in Detroit, MI and Brussels, Belgium and other venues. She was recognized in 2016 as a 'particularly imaginative polymath' by the Imagination Institute, University of Pennsylvania and has been a fellow and guest speaker on the ethical and sustainable use of artificial intelligence at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria. Dr Lopez holds B.A.s in psychology and French and an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive science, all from JHU. She is completing a graduate certificate in international studies at the School of Advanced International Studies from JHU.