Consciousness of Cyber Defense: Boundary Objects for Expansive Learning Through Creation of Contradictions

摘要

Cyber attackers gain access into systems, networks and cybcrin-frastructure by escalating privileges to confidential information regardless of the efforts systems engineers put into security. The chess game between cyber offense and defense destabilizes the ability of organizations to protect their information assets. This research employs the lens of Activity Theory to study the interaction through the contradictions embedded between the cyber attackers and cyber defenders. These types of contradictions were forcefully created and simulated in the cyber security virtual lab at Florida State University for the purpose of facilitating real-world scenario-based learning experiences. Both network traffic data and interviews were collected in order to identify the boundary objects that intersect the two activity systems. Natural language processing (NLP) was adopted to explore and extract topics frequently used by both activity systems. Consciousness of cyber defense was expanded by creating contradictions, and boundary objects were identified by comparing the interactions between these two activity systems.