GrammaTech, Inc., along with the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Social Machines, has won a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity under their Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses Program.
Under this research project, GrammaTech and its partners will improve cybersecurity through a new set of cyberpsychology-informed defenses that use attackers’ human limitations, such as innate decision-making biases and cognitive vulnerabilities, the company said.
This work is critical to advancing knowledge of attacker psychology and developing context-aware defenses.
“The GrammaTech team is honored to be chosen for this effort,” said Ray DeMeo, chief growth officer at GrammaTech. “Humans have long been identified as the greatest cybersecurity threat. Most often, the human component is discussed only in the context of the inadequacies of users and system defenders. GrammaTech, with its decades of experience developing security for the hardest mission-critical use cases, will now focus on the behavioral weaknesses of attackers to mitigate their threat effectiveness.”
Domains like marketing and e-commerce can benefit from understanding human biases to achieve critical objectives. The ReSCIND program will assess these effects in cybersecurity and develop attacker-specific defense strategies by identifying and responding to cognitive vulnerabilities.
To do so, GrammaTech will use human studies data and autonomic software tooling to produce software mechanisms that detect biases and challenge attackers based on cognitive profiles. Ultimately, this will build a framework for identifying and responding to cyber attacks, insider threats and anomalous user behavior.
According to the company, the research is based on work supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and IARPA via N66001-24-C-4502.