Lori D. Coombs
Marymount University, USA
Abstract Title:Understanding the Implications of Cyber-relevant Cognitive Vulnerabilities and Their Impacts on Protecting Aerospace & Aeronautical Systems from Cyber-Attacks
Biography:
Lori D. Coombs works full-time as a Sr. AI & Research Scientist and part-time as an Assoc. Prof. at the Univ of Arizona Global Campus. Lori’s lab seeks to understand interactions between solar energetic particles, space weather, climate change, & planetary alignment associated with space travel. Lori’s previous appointments include managing NASA’s cybersecurity efforts for Earthdata Infrastructure & Login.? For 20+ years, she continues to support C6ISR programs. Lori is pursuing a D.Sc. in Cybersecurity at Marymount Univ and has been accepted into the Univ of Oxford’s Sustainable Business Programme. She has a MS in Sys Engineering, MBA, and a BS.
Research Interest:
Research supports aerospace and aeronautical engineering by focusing on emerging technologies that implicate cybersecurity by identifying the impacts of cyber-relevant cognitive vulnerabilities in an effort to develop Cyberpsychology-informed Defenses (CyphiDs) to enhance design processes, harden systems and increase cybersecurity posture against cyber-attacks. Research may lead to a quantum mechanics approach to support understanding human behavior for developing probability-based decision models that produce Adaptive Psychological-informed Defenses (APhiDs) which can automate the CyphiD sequences. Cyber deception is a defensive technique that considers human factors and the components of a cyber-attack. Deception aims to make it more difficult for bad actors. Experiments will be conducted in a three-phase approach that creates a new cyber research dataset for shared use that can support new human-focused research for the academic and science communities. The Theory Planned Behavior approach will be leveraged because focus is placed on understanding human factors that determine behaviors and decision making processes as they relate to cybersecurity. The Grounded Theory approach is used with an emphasis on creating cyber-specific computational cognitive models (C3M) that reflect and predict attacker behavior based on grounded data that has been systematically collected and analyzed to develop CyphiDs. CyphiD research data that is developed from open science information shall provide solutions for the evolution of the digital roll-out that considers software sustainment that has evolved to incorporate continuous engineering, to fix problems and provide new capabilities for new hardware and/or new threats that demand new functionality for space and flight systems. The goal of this research study is to understand the cognitive vulnerabilities and behavior to advance the science of cyberpsychology and research which helps researchers, engineers and users to anticipate the behavior of cyber operators and understand how they interact with these distinctions