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Human Characteristics and Genomic Factors as Behavioural Aspects for Cybersecurity

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Abstract

Modern behavioural genetic studies of personality investigate the genetic and environmental contribution to the development of personality and the genetic and environmental covariance with a range of characteristics, as well as stress, impulsiveness, and addiction. Cyber kill chains are used to define stages of the incident and to position an event. The risky behaviour, possible human addictions, and weaknesses are used in the evaluation, selecting the best human-to-human or human-machine-human interactions strategy. An unintentional human error can cause cybersecurity breaches, because stress, long working hours, and set of wide-range responsibilities lower caution and increase the impact of individual characteristics on the decision rationality. This work aims to hypothesise a possible holistic architecture for specific human behaviour factors involved in cybersecurity risks. A good cybersecurity habit could prevent incidents and protect against attacks. Habits are mostly initiated automatically. Therefore, they can dominate personal behavioural patterns under specific circumstances. Genetic heritability of impulsiveness is considered as moderate from 33% to 50%. Genomic data study of particular individuals can help identify one’s behaviour patterns and show the risks in cybersecurity for that individual. An individual risk profile could be generated by combining known genome variants linked to a trait of particular behaviour analysing molecular pathways of Dopamin, Serotonin, Catecholaminergic, GABAergic, neurons migration, Opioid, cannabinoid system and other addiction genes. Construction of a model strategy when including genomic information results for the specification of human behavioural characteristics might benefit towards higher risk assessment in cybersecurity processes.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by project Advancing Human Performance in Cybersecurity, ADVANCES. The ADVANCES is funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Grants.

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Ambrozaitytė, L., Brilingaitė, A., Bukauskas, L., Domarkienė, I., Rančelis, T. (2021). Human Characteristics and Genomic Factors as Behavioural Aspects for Cybersecurity. In: Schmorrow, D.D., Fidopiastis, C.M. (eds) Augmented Cognition. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12776. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78114-9_23

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