Psychological Fallout: DARPA-Backed Project Addresses Societal Toll of Cyberattacks

The United States has prepared for decades to defend itself from every conceivable military conflict on its shores, but it turns out psychological warfare, not missiles, might pose the greatest threat to national security. 

This is a challenge Assistant Professor Ryan Shandler will spend the next two years exploring as a recipient of the Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

DARPA uses this award to recognize up-and-coming early-career faculty it hopes to continue working with in the future. 

Currently, DARPA is concerned with cyberattacks from foreign countries aimed at provoking social unrest and eroding public trust in democratic institutions. In a study released last year by Microsoft, it was estimated that 600 million cyberattacks were launched everyday by criminals and nation-state actors from July 2023 to July 2024.  

Tools built by cybersecurity engineers help mitigate the attacks made by criminals and in some cases even help track down stolen money. However, nation-state actors don’t launch cyberattacks to score a payday. 

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Instead, they attack things like power plants or voting precincts as a show of strength. Exposing these vulnerabilities shows how unsafe life could be, and these actors want nothing more than to cause total panic. 

So now instead looking only to hardware and software for the solution to this problem, DARPA is investing in the human dimension of cybersecurity. 

This area has long been a focus of Shandler’s research, making him uniquely qualified to confront this previously overlooked vulnerability. His past experiments have already shown how cyberattacks generate severe public anxiety and prompt calls for physical military retaliation.

For this new project, he will track a controlled population of several thousand people by exposing them to simulated cyberattacks. At no point will the participants be made to think the attacks are real. Shandler and his team will then interview the participants to gauge how their experience impacted their perception of security.

“We are looking to see which groups are more susceptible to this kind of cumulative threat.  Once we model the risk, the next step will be building countermeasures to defend against it,” he said. 

However, creating a defense system that promotes societal resilience will be as challenging as it is revolutionary. 

"I'm fortunate to be conducting this research in an interdisciplinary unit like the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. Tackling a challenge of this scale requires computer scientists and social scientists working side by side,” Shandler said.

“Alone, neither field stands a chance—but together, we stand a real chance of success."

Shandler is jointly appointed with the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.