K Raghav Bhat1, Robert S. Gutzwiller1, Sean Guarino2, Spencer Lynn2, Benjamin Clegg3, Joel Hypolite2, Michael Seiffert4, Michael Locasto5, David Kelle2, Max Slocum4, Curt Wu2, Scott Harrison2, Matthew Revelle3, Susan Latiff2
59th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Maui, HI (6-9 January 2026)
Oppositional human factors (OHF) seeks to exploit tendencies in human thinking to disrupt cyber attackers. One tendency is base rate neglect (BRN), where individuals overlook the likelihood of an event during reasoning, and instead base judgements on salient surface details. An expert sample of cyber red teamers completed cognitive bias survey measures, followed by missions in a cyber range. In the range, features on a server consistent with a vulnerability but out of context (extremely low base rate) were used to test whether these experts would ignore such base rates. BRN was found, including meaningful, significant performance reductions, suggesting a real, valid path for OHF techniques. Further, this approach can be employed even where bias susceptibility predictions for an attacker are unavailable.
1 Arizona State University
2 Charles River Analytics
3 Montana State University
4 Assured Information Security
5 Narf Industries
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