A new hope: Human-centric cyber security research embedded within organizations

The ‘human’ element of any digital system is as important to its enduring security posture. More research is needed to better understand human cybersecurity vulnerabilities within organizations. This will inform the development of methods (including those rooted in HCI) to decrease cyber risky and enhance cyber safe decisions and behaviors: to fight back, showing how humans, with the right support, can be the best line of cybersecurity defense. In this paper, we assert that in order to achieve the highest positive impactful benefits from such research efforts, more human-centric cybersecurity research needs to be conducted with expert teams embedded within industrial organizations driving forward the research. This cannot be an issue addressed through laboratory-based research alone. Industrial organizations need to move towards more holistic – human- and systems- centric – cybersecurity research and solutions that will create safer and more secure employees and organizations; working in harmony to better defend against cyber-attack attempts. One such example is the Airbus Accelerator in Human-Centric Cyber Security (H2CS), which is discussed as a case study example within the current paper.