CEC3: Cognitively Enhanced Cyber Command and Control

ABSTRACT:Effective Command and Control (C2) is critical for maintaining the Air Forces operational superiority. However, vulnerabilities in legacy systems may be exploited by adversarial cyber-attacks. Protecting network systems requires operators to sift through volumes of unstructured data. Operators rely on visualizations to manage data for decision-making. However, poor design, functionality, and/or decision support limits the usefulness of these tools. These limitations result in costly errors because they impede operators situation awareness. In light of these issues, Modus Operandi proposes a Cognitively Enhanced Cyber Command and Control (CEC3) system for supporting cyber operator decision-making. This tool will aid the collection, analysis and structuring of cyber data by placing data into a design artifact that is optimized for conveying that information to support the system design. It will do this by combining the user-oriented, cognitive-centered GIFIC language and the data-analytic power of Modus Operandis VIA platform. By processing and presenting data in this manner, operators can maintain situational awareness and successfully complete their daily tasks.BENEFIT:The CEC3 approach optimizes users situation awareness and decision-making capabilities by augmenting cyber operators ability to consume information. Additionally, this approach reduces up-front data analysis efforts and captures operators subject matter expertise that can be encoded in the display. With CEC3s ability to continually monitor real time network traffic, visualize multi-dimensional data, utilize pattern recognition and sophisticated rules incorporating historic data to identify and alert users of potential adversarial activity will transition well into the commercial Cyber Security Market one of the fastest growing markets in the broad technology sector.