Together witih Timea Pahi and Florian Skopik, we wrote a book chapter on Situational Awareness for Strategic Decision Making on National Level in the book Collaborative Cyber Threat Intelligence published by CRC press.
Situational Awareness for Strategic Decision Making on a National Level
Abstract: With highly interconnected stakeholders, IT networks, and systems, international cooperation and coordination is becoming essential for the protection of global and local networks and services. Conventional strategies require a global view for the stabilization and protection of IT networks and systems. Much effort and solutions have been proposed to establish situational awareness (SA) within organizations (i.e. their local ICT networks). In general, SA is the perception of the element in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future. Enabling SA in cyber space, further called cyber situational awareness (CSA), is becoming a key factor for governments or public bodies. For example, CSA entails establishing preventive measures, monitoring evolving threats and campaigns in diverse and distributed IT landscapes as well as mitigating threats and sharing the information in certain trust circles to stay up-to-date. Nowadays, most critical infrastructures are operated by private organizations. The evaluation and impact analysis of critical incidents (i.e. that affect national economy or health) can be conducted such as with private-public partnerships. This chapter focuses on how (cyber) situational awareness can be established at national level to enable strategic decision making processes. In this context, national cyber security strategies are examined and it is investigated how they contribute and provide tools to foster SA. Furthermore, cyber security centers and their main tasks and responsibilities are investigated. In addition, SA models for decision making processes at individual, organizational or national level are assessed as well as how information and sources can be used to establish SA on national level.