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Culture + Cyber: Exploring the Relationship

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Book cover Advances in Human Factors in Cybersecurity (AHFE 2017)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 593))

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Abstract

Distinguished social psychologist Geert Hofstede observed, “This dominance of technology over culture is an illusion. The software of the machines may be globalized, but the software of the minds that use them is not.” The role of culture in the thought process is prevalent, yet unstated, that many cultural beliefs and biases are accepted as truths. Cultural beliefs and biases are incorporated into the thought process where they reveal themselves in patterns of thought. Once the thought patterns are established they may be observed in the digital trail that results from online interactions. Once captured online, the behaviors can be reviewed and examined in multiple ways so that researchers can gain new insights.

Historically, observations have taken place in the physical environment; this talk discusses findings of cultural markers in the cyber realm. The results of evidence-based research exploring the relationship between national culture and cyber behaviors will be discussed. These quantitative, observational studies were the result of researchers mining the raw website defacements found in the Zone-H archives containing over 10 million records. Mining the dataset and evaluating the findings within Hofstede’s cultural framework allowed for research into behaviors, preferences, reasons, imaging, sentiment analysis, and various other aspects of attacker and victim cybersecurity actors. The use of Hofstede’s six dimensional cultural framework to define culture, along with some basic inferential statistics, resulted in specific digital identifiers that were associated with specific cultural dimensions. Over time findings can be trended, allowing for more accurate modeling of cyber actors based on cultural values. The results supported Nisbett’s observation that people “think the way they do because of the nature of the societies they line in”.

This discussion centers on the six dimensions of culture, the values associated with each dimension, and examples of those values in cyber space for victims, attackers and defenders. The six cultural dimensions measure views on self-determination, collectivism, aggression, nurturing, uncertain outcomes, holism, instant gratification, and levels of societal openness. The behavioral traits that associate with the cultural values are behavioural traits that are consistent with cyber behaviors.

Cultural values provide context for individual behaviors by determining the norm for a group. Thus, behavior that may seem perfectly normal in one environment may stand out as odd in a different environment. Cultural difference have been historically used to model adversaries in the kinetic world. Moving this analysis into the cyber realm offers the potential to gain greater insights into all cyber actors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The small number of records and the scope of the study made this an unreported finding. Of the 20 countries examined 10 showed strong preferences where the frequency of first choice vector was used in over 50% of the cases and 5 showed no preference where the frequency of the first choice and other choices were evenly distributed. The group that showed the median value of the no preference group’s long-term orientation to be 20.

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Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on. Contributing studies for this research were performed with the University of Warwick through the IAS fellowship. Special thanks to Professor Tim Watson, Professor Carsten Maple and Bil Hallaq at the University of Warwick, Dr. Andre Karamanian at Cisco Systems and Marc Kolenko at Price-Waterhouse Coopers for their assistance on the referenced studies and their assistance in attacker identification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA

    Char Sample, Jennifer Cowley & Steve Hutchinson

  2. US Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, MD, USA

    Jonathan Bakdash

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  1. Char Sample
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  2. Jennifer Cowley
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  4. Jonathan Bakdash
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Correspondence to Char Sample .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Soar Technology, Inc., Belle Isle, Florida, USA

    Denise Nicholson

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Sample, C., Cowley, J., Hutchinson, S., Bakdash, J. (2018). Culture + Cyber: Exploring the Relationship. In: Nicholson, D. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Cybersecurity. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 593. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60585-2_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60585-2_18

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